The Certain Result of Uncertainty

I grow old… I grow old… Do I dare to eat a peach?

—“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” by T.S. Eliot

Get a grip, people. You’re not growing old, you’re growing soft. You’re wishy washy. You’re indecisive. Oh, my, you just don’t know what to do.

Well, this is your lucky day. I’m here to tell you. Get out and vote.

This is not the time to be worrying about whether a peach might upset your digestion. You’ve got cancer. You need to cut it out. Or it will kill you. Do something about it or sit around wringing your hands and die. Those are your choices.

I don’t have to tell you what the cancer is. We all know. Some of us think it’s the political left, some the right. I know what I think, but I’m not going to try to convince you. I can probably count on one hand the number of people whose opinions I have been able to influence in the course of my life. I have five fingers and five children. I got them young, like the religions do, so that was a big advantage. I overplayed my hand occasionally, but mainly I’m happy with the character and intelligence they have as adults. They were my disciples. Pretty much no one else has ever listened to me unless I had something they wanted and they had to put up with me to get it. And once they got it, they reset.

We have crises in this country in the form of political and cultural clashes all the time. Some of them have been pretty nasty. Burning witches (ok, not technically America then), slavery, Jim Crow, civil rights movement. There was a rough ten-year span when I was young when we killed JFK, MLK and RFK and damn near burned down the country over civil rights and the Viet Nam war.

Maybe I’m just getting old and overly sensitive (although I love peaches), but this time feels very bad. Civil War bad. Jim Crow bad. You may think it feels more like the fear of communism in the fifties, with socialism standing in for the hammer and sickle. I don’t want the state to take over the means of production either, but I think there’s room for us to do more to help one another without running the risk of becoming Venezuela.

But if you disagree, I’m not going to convince you, so I’m not even going to try.

What I am going to tell you is the same thing I want to tell everyone. Vote.

Let’s all put it on the line and see just who we are. 

And don’t waste you vote on something you call principle. In 2020, a vote for anyone but the Republican or the Democrat is a wasted vote. It will count exactly the same as if you don’t vote at all.

I think all of us can agree that we have fought hard over the years to protect our right to vote. So use it. Go to the polls and vote the way you would go to the doctor and take the cancer treatment she said could work. Don’t take some homeopathic cure that doesn’t have a chance of helping you. And don’t lie in your bed curled up in a fetal position hoping it will just go away. It won't.

What will go away is the way of life you would choose but are too lazy or frightened or cynical to speak up for.