This Is Not the Life I Ordered - The Contest for the White House in 2024: A Clear Case of Good vs. Evil

To be honest, I'm not even thinking about policy issues right now. I know that sounds ridiculous, lazy even, but if the choice between two truly decent, nice, and relatable, highly intelligent people and two Disney-villiain level freaks is really splitting this country 50/50, then we have a major ethical culture chasm in this country. Yes, the GOP have a major point about the border; about violent crime in our major cities; about disintegrating family values. Liberals really do need a better solution for these issues that doesn't try to justify unjustifiably aberrant behavior on centuries-old beefs that go back to the colonies. But where are the Mitt Romneys and Liz Cheneys and George Bushes (father or son) of that political party? These were/are decent people, respectable conservative voices in very recent history. Where did they go? Now we have two cartoonishly evil people (and a whole chorus of equally despicable weirdos on their ass-kissing end of the legislative branch) who are a couple of red county majority votes away, essentially, in about four or five states, from winning this election. People who basically invented the word "freedoms" but who literally rolled back women's reproductive autonomy a whole half century. People who call themselves patriots but who can't bring themselves to condemn the nutjobs who terrorized our Capitol Building. People who will invoke the Constitution to get out of a parking ticket but who unabashedly denied a sitting president a SCOTUS nomination -- only to imbalance the court to the right in the next administration. All led by a living embodiment of the Seven Deadly Sins who rants on X/Twitter like a grounded pre-adolescent little monster about every imaginable perceived slight. Whose ear, in case anyone forgot, was supposedly grazed by a bullet or shrapnel or broken plexiglass in an assassination attempt but healed faster than a skinned knee on a five-year old. But we don't need to go there.

(And, neither did they.)

I don't know what the other half of this country sees or hears when they see Kamala Harris but I see my mother and my aunts and all the black women I've known all of my life growing up in my mother's hair salon. I've seen Kamala when she is about to "read" someone in countless black women, I hear in her laugh (the "cackle") the sound of a cacophony of bliss and familiarity when in a room filled with black women, one of them says something that's "right on time," i.e. witty or clever and nails the point or the moment in the soulful way that only women of color can. And when she, as Vance puts it, "changes her voice to appeal to whatever audience is in front of her," I hear my own mother who could and still can code-switch from an "East-Side" black girl from Detroit to an upper-middle class PTA mom in the time it takes to turn around and answer the phone. Harris, I believe, is savvy enough to know who she is familiar to and to whom, in kind, she seems exotic, strange, or disingenuous. So she smartly picked someone who looks to those people like a familiar figure in their communities: the hometown football coach, the Social Studies teacher, the rural, red-state dad.

I don't know who a blustery, bouffant, rouge-wearing con man and his Maybe It's Maybelline sidekick look familiar to, but if you're someone reading this and these are "your people", do you mind helping me understand what on Earth it is that you don't find utterly terrifying about a Trump/Vance presidency? Asking for a LOT of friends.