Elections are All About Change. And That's a Good Thing...Except When It Isn't

Are you stressed out by the election? Of course not. Most Americans take the election in stride. For most of us, it's just another work day. Even if we're politically engaged and intensely interested in the outcome, can you honestly say that you're "stressed" by all the hoopla and blather? 

“Our brains are basically threat detectors. If you’re feeling stressed, it simply means you’re paying attention,” a Duke psychologist said. 

Gee. I wonder whom Doctor Duke is going to vote for.

I'm with JD Vance on this: Take a chill pill. The old, dead, white guys who created the United States designed it so that civic participation was optional, not mandatory. And that's proper in a free country. We are free to care or not care about the outcome of the election. 

One thing is certain: It will take a lot more than Kamala Harris and her minions to "destroy" the United States. This is the 13th national election I've been witness to since I turned 18 in 1972. And I'm old enough to remember a few more. Barry Goldwater was portrayed as Hitler's descendant, Richard Nison was always a villain, and Reagan, both Bushes and any GOP candidate for president were portrayed as dangerous Nazis. It's as predictable as a sunrise that Democrats will seek to smear Republicans as anti-democratic.

The one constant throughout the decades is that America is changing and will continue to change. It doesn't stand still for anyone or anything. It doesn't always change in ways we might want to see, but the undercurrents of history flow beneath us like a fast-moving river regardless of our hopes and desires.

"America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again," intoned James Earl Jones so beautifully in "Field of Dreams." I remarked when Barack Obama was elected in 2008 that I had been fortunate to live long enough to see the incredible transformation of black people being denied a seat at a southern lunch counter to the election of a black man as president.

Sometimes those "steamrollers" erase treasured parts of our past. Sometimes, as in the case of the lunch counters, it's a good thing. Other times, as in the case of the destruction of statues that recognized Southern Civil War personalities, it's a bad thing. 

Most often, the changes are incremental. The feminist "revolution" had been underway for 150 years before Betty Friedan and the bra burners took center stage and roiled the country. Some of the changes the feminists initiated were long overdue and welcome. Others were toxic. But that's the nature of change.

We have very little control over what happens. Lincoln once said, “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me." He knew better than any other president before or since that change was inevitable and could not be controlled in any meaningful way. 

Both Trump and Harris will try to "control" events if they are elected, but it's a mirage. For example, Joe Biden may wish to avoid a shooting war with Russia, but he has put the U.S. in a position where it's not his decision to make. We may go to war based on decisions made in Moscow or Kyiv. Biden is kidding himself if he thinks it's solely up to him whether the U.S. goes to war.

We may not be able to control events that shape the future, but we can certainly influence them. For Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, it's going to be how much they want to change the course of history and how many people they can convince to come along with them.