https://medium.com/@philgarber/blog

0815blog

Sun On the Horizon

The smear campaign has begun in earnest just a week after Kamala Harris was chosen as Joe Biden’s running mate and I am so done with the crass, uneducated, vile and poisonous Trump and his evil band of gun-toting, white supremacist, xenophobic Trumpers.

If Trump, the right wing media, Q nuts and the Trumpers are to be believed:

A. Kamala Harris is just an angry niggah who can’t think because she has a chip on her shoulder the size of California.

B. She cannot claim to be African American because her mother is from India and her father is from Jamaica. Last I knew, Jamaicans identify as black and that country has a long and bitter history of slavery.

C. Harris cannot run for vice president because her parents weren’t born in the U.S. (That ignores a teeny, weeny clause in the constitution that says you are a citizen if you were born here and Harris was born in the U.S.).

Maybe I’m cynical but I saw the news about Trump visiting his sick brother in the hospital but rather than concerned and saddened, I believe Trump went to see his brother to have him sign a deathbed non disclosure agreement.

He is so uncouth and so uneducated that if you asked him about Napoleon he’d think you’re talking about a dessert and if you mentioned Beethoven he’d say you were talking about a big dog from Thigh Land. He tweets about “covfefe,” the nation of “Nambia,” “bad hombres,” “The possibility of lasting peach,” “unpresidented act,” “No dream is too big, no challenge is to (should be too) great,” “attaker,” “W.E.B. DeBois (should be Dubois),” “Secretary of Educatuon,” “Columbia (OK if you’re talking about the college, not the country” and last but not least, “Honered to serve.”

But there is less than three months before the nightmare is over and we can be released from this purgatory that bores through and eats at your brain like the earwig in Star Trek. It is a poison that effects every aspect of the day, effects sleep, makes us all angry, confused, mistrustful and overall, lousy.

I crave the day that will come soon when he who shall not be named will not be named in this blog anymore. I can wake up and tell myself that Trump is no longer my problem and I can busy myself with talking about a president who is genuinely compassionate and bright, not someone who makes Attila seem genteel.

A small example of Biden’s compassion came when my son wrote then Vice President Joe Biden in 2011. My son, who stutters, had created a minor media sensation when the N.Y. Times ran a story after his college professor told him to write his questions down because he took too long to ask them in class.

My son wrote about his experiences as a young man who stutters to Biden who has had a lifetime stutter. One day, we came home to find a message on our answering machine. It was a 10 minute message from Biden who told my son that he understands the pain and difficulty of stuttering congratulated my son for speaking out.

I suppose a real nattering nabob of negativism would claim that Biden probably called my son because he was bored and didn’t really have much to do as vice president. I say it was an example of man who has persevered and grown through a life of utmost despair and challenges.

Kind of like Trump, whose worst experience came at the Four Seasons restaurant when he ordered a Faust Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon 2017 only to find there were none left so he decided to spend the $49,498 and get his own bottle, in part because the Wire For Wine website offers free shipping. Oh the inhumanity of it.

My blog for Jan. 21 will have no reference to he who shall not be named. It will be filled with positive commentary centering on a man who did not quit when faced with life’s most horrible moments. And it will include words about a vice president whose immigrant parents settled in California and who later earned her law degree. And people who smile genuinely and like pets.

I will not give the new administration carte blanche to operate without questions. But I also will not assume that their motives are always self-serving and underhanded, as they are currently.

Bring it on Joe and Kamala. I’m looking forward to a ride on a wave of positive and constructive actions to replace the black hole that has been created.