Greetings,
The best metaphor for America today may be a medical one. Every country faces problems and every person faces the threat of disease, but ‘health’ is the ability to deal with these threats. For problems as simple as sniffles or as bad as the flu, healthy countries or people can usually recover. Others illnesses will kill us if left untreated.
Cancer develops quietly for years until the symptoms become too obvious to ignore, but once it’s diagnosed the only options are treatment or death. Similarly, problems like systemic racism, economic devastation, endless war, environmental destruction, and more have been festering in our country for decades. Their symptoms have been undeniable for a while, and now most of us realize that, on some level, our options are treatment or death.
Through Reagan, two Bushes, a Clinton and an Obama, America has been a cancer patient. Some doctors offered to treat the symptoms while others offered placebos. Most offered anesthetics. None offered a cure. We, the American citizenry, were left to argue which ineffective treatment was best while the cancer kept growing. Then came Trump, and it was as if someone shouldered through the doctors to douse the patient with gasoline and set them on fire. The cancer was still there, but now the fire would kill the patient
Here’s all our ads from the days of KPOJ… almost 200 of them!
much more quickly and effectively. For four years we burned, and anyone offering a cancer cure was sidelined. There was a bigger priority… we had to put out the fire. And we did.
Now our team of doctors faces a cancer patient who is also a burn victim. Those burns are wide, deep, and life-threatening. It wouldn’t make sense to pretend Trump is still stoking the fire but it also wouldn’t make sense to pretend his burns aren’t there. They might yet be fatal in themselves, but they’ll certainly complicate any treatment of the underlying cancer in the meantime. But the cancer still grows, and we desperately search for a cure.
We’ve had an editorial opinion on just about every subject for years
Republicans and Democrats aren’t the same at all, but both played their own parts in the cancer eating us and I don’t think political partisanship is helpful in calling out governmental abuse. I look back over my Tidbits from the Obama years and I don’t see fawning partisanship, I see critiques of NSA spying, drone murders, and healthcare failures. Our KPOJ spots from the Bush years weren’t just empty attacks on Republicans, but substantive disagreements on corporate citizenship, endless war, and corruption. Even during Trump’s reign, I tried to pay attention to the cancer until the fire took center stage. Now the fire is out, but Biden and the Democrats have helped metastasize the cancer with devastating criminal justice, trade, and economic policies for decades. They’re a welcome return to sanity compared to Trump and there are real reasons to be hopeful. But we still have cancer, and I intend to be very critical of Joe Biden’s medical recommendations in the next four years.
We’re all huddled around the charred hospital bed of our Loved One, hoping against hope for the best. Covid is beating the patient with a baseball bat, Russia is making the heart monitors give bad readings, and a crowd of people from South America is banging at the door of the hospital room to get in. Without a doubt, other problems are coming down the hall. Our original team of doctors still waffles between symptom relief, placebos, or an actual cure, while a couple strange new doctors even recommend lighting the fire again. Two months into the Biden administration is too early to be sure what Dr. Joe Biden is peddling, but for now at least, the fire is out… we can concentrate on the cancer.
Make a great day,
