Overcoming 2020 takes unified front
On Nov. 3, Americans will go to the polls to elect a president, one-third of the Senate, and all of the House of Representatives.
While early polling has already started in many states, with latest numbers showing over 66 million of Americans have casted their ballots, the conditions under which the elections are being conducted are in many ways unprecedented.
The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic and its spread around the world has significantly disrupted our election cycle, posing risks as to how to conduct a genuine and transparent election.
How did it come to this?
COVID-19 has humbled and humiliated the planet’s most powerful nation. As a result, our status as a global leader has been diminished.
Few countries have been as severely hit as the United States, which has 4% of the world’s population but a quarter of its confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths.
Presently, the United States spends about 2.5% of its health-care budget on public health. Many underfunded health departments are already struggling to deal with health issues such as opioid addiction, climbing obesity rates and contaminated water systems, i.e. Flint, Michigan and Newark, New Jersey, along with other preventable diseases.
Compared with the average industrialized wealthy nations, the United States spends nearly twice as much of its national wealth on health care.
The confluence of recent events has made the present COVID-19 challenge even more precarious. In addition to the risks posed by the continued presence of COVID-19, with little sign of it abating, the United States continues to experience social protests concerning criminal justice reform as the result of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25 and the Sept. 23 verdict in the case of the police killing of Breonna Taylor, has re-energized protesters.
Also, during this period of converging natural disasters in the form of devastating wildfires across the state of California and a series of hurricanes that have come ashore from the Gulf of Mexico, have placed added pressure on many communities.
The structure of the political system itself, coupled with heightened partisanship and divisive political discourse means that responses to these disasters have been varied and in some cases, highly contested.
A further development that raises the stakes of this election year, is the recent death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, which opens up the possibility for the Republican Party to secure a new judge on the bench, thereby changing the ideological balance of the court for more than a generation.
It takes all of us
The choppy waters between now and November will see continued disagreements over the appropriate response to the pandemic, along with contentious and vigorous debates over the current Supreme Court vacancy.
We are in the midst of a storm involving COVID-19, global climate change and social unrest. If we can find the ability to jettison partisanship bickering and replace it with respect and commonsense, the tipping point will soon be upon us, which will bring about important and significant change.
If there was ever a time for us to seriously keep hope alive and remain positive, now is that time.
Spencer Wiggins is the President of People Services Solutions, a community affairs consulting firm and former Chairman of the Tennessee Human Rights Commission.