Everybody’s talkin’ at me / I don’t hear a word they’re sayin’ / Only the echoes of my mind
Harry Nilsson’s theme song for “Midnight Cowboy” could also be the theme song for our upcoming presidential election and our politics in general. Right or left, your mind was probably made up in 2016, if not before. I am that endangered species, the political moderate. If I give Mr. Donald Trump credit for anything he did as president, and I do, my Democrat friends are aghast. If I do not condemn Mr. Joe Biden as the worst president in U.S. history, my Republican friends think I’ve been brainwashed by Rachel Maddow.
I cannot please anyone. Sadly, our current political era leaves us moderates out in the cold. Disinformation and conspiracy theories play into fixing our political positions like we have been turned into stone by Medusa because we can’t even agree on the facts. Yes, I am talking to those of you who think the 2020 election was fraudulent. It wasn’t, and your arguments are contorted to the point of becoming a circus act. So, where does that leave me this November? I have decided that I am going to try and take the summer off from politics. I’m not going off the grid, but I will do my best to try and find places where issues are being discussed rationally — admittedly no easy thing — and where we agree on basic facts, even if that means starting with the fact that Planet Earth isn’t flat. October and November will be here before we know it. To paraphrase Betty Davis in the movie “All About Eve,” fasten your seat belts, it is going to be a bumpy ride.
Philip Wasserman
Santa Clarita
