Ruminations on Election 2024

With the 2024 Election season over, my text messaging application is getting a much-needed respite from the continual hammering of political messages that have been delivered to it for the past year or more. Commercials on TV, whatever that is anymore, hopefully will return to whatever they were before the political season began in earnest.

We now must endure the onslaught of analyses hoping to reveal reasons for and insights explaining losses and gains. Those so-called analyses we’ve seen within just two days of the election outcome, whether from pollsters, political strategists and politicians, talk show hosts, science magazine editors, or myriad others, point to where “the trains have gone off the rails”. Some are filled with gloom and doom predictions of what is likely to unfold, and others are jubilant about market potential and return to values they hold sacred, while others call those who committed to leave the US should the outcome not go in the ways they preferred “all talk”. Some say the middle class has been abandoned, while others say it has not been, and thus the win. Some say that the time to campaign independent of the past simply was too short, while others say there were no compelling differences anyway, hence the irrelevance of the shortness of time.

Perhaps we can spare ourselves and the analysts some time with a few simple observations:

Polarizing name-calling is a poor way to distinguish points of view. Whether our party affiliation as legal US Citizens is with a party with the starting letter “D” or “R” or “I” or “G” or even “U”, we are Citizens of the United States. We are brothers and sisters from other mothers and fathers. We probably learned the phrase “sticks and stones…” as children that is no less true today than way back when, but that, in combination with sound bites of the press and our propensity to believe “we get it all” from the title of a press release or article, form a damaging combination resulting in polarization in our American family. Coupling that with media broadcasts positioning hosts with “the last word”, essentially allowing them to form a narrative of division masquerading as distinction, has contributed to getting us to where we are as a nation today. We are divided for want of researching deep into the real crux of things. Instead, we parrot the sound bites of others as though these form coherent and complete justifications for right vs. wrong.

Bollocks.

We need to stop the name-calling. People on all fronts are guilty of doing this, and all of us need to grow up. We need to talk about ideas and solutions to well-formed problem statements rather than small-mindedly and disparagingly about people and pithy vacuous and incomplete alternatives. We need to dig into the facts… we need to search them out and stop allowing the press to sole-source the information on which we base our conclusions. I’d go as far as saying that we need to stop watching people spin their narratives and following social media channels and, instead, do more reading to form our own. We need to talk with each other to get to know each other and the real problems we shoulder and go beyond the labels to serve and help.

Pollsters have failed spectacularly, not just in the 2024 election, but in the preceding one. We worry over the statistical biases of Artificial Intelligence, but we pay no real attention to the statistical biases — mirroring human biases — of polls.

Why is that?

It could be laziness. It could be that those funding the polls and pollsters themselves choose to be manipulative in support of vacuous and manipulative narratives.

I don’t know, in fact. But I can say that polls I’ve read in the past years don’t represent me, and no one has asked me about my views unless they accompany the ask with a request for funding.

Maybe we should return to thinking for ourselves a little bit more. Trust but verify.

Being data-driven is something we can be today, because there is a lot of data to drive us. But data doesn’t represent information until it is curated and vetted. There is a dearth of both. Thus, there is so much noise in the signals we get that it obscures any real signals, making the data we get all but worthless. Unusable. Yet it is used to our collective detriment.

We need to be information-driven, not just data-driven.

Many of us are beyond offended that votes are being bought and sold. Billions of dollars were raised to support campaign travel and news media blitzes attempting to get the last words in. Amounts of money raised were used as a measure of alignment on points of view when we know, in fact, that some donors, at least, didn’t intend to align, only to hurt all Americans.

Attempts have been made to commoditize Democracy. We need to be principled and simply reject and resist them.

We have moved away from principled and logical thinking about the real problems that we must solve, and about the real opportunities that we should pursue. We’ve become distracted by social issues that become problems we believe Government is most qualified to solve when it cannot even get its own house in order. We need to move back to serving each other and creating and innovating together — which effectively will allow us to move forward.

Immigration. Self-reliance and resilience as a nation. Support of Military and Law Enforcement. Employment. Costs of living. Mental Health. National Security.

These matters represent and impact human lives and America’s existence.

We must give continued focus to helping people in other nations who want to responsibly participate with us in America so that they can come in properly, and that they participate and do not intentionally become a burden. We must develop fuel sources that reduce our dependencies on outside countries and take better advantage of the resources we have in America while caring for our environment — these do not have to be mutually exclusive. We need to combat greed while not succumbing to envy. We need to give people the dignity of employment with jobs sourced in the US. We need to invest in our Military and our Law Enforcement — investment costs money that needs to be properly stewarded. We need to use our tax monies wisely. We’ve seen the reprehensible waste perpetrated by our own Congress and the machines of government behind them. Our indignance over such should take the form of a massive house cleaning to eliminate life-long politicians that have become greedy and too selfish to serve any other than themselves, all in the name of service, of course.

These are not pendulums that we can affordably allow to swing back and forth every four years, giving and taking away money, changing the definitions of right and wrong to manipulate and socially engineer. Instead, we must be more engaged — with responsible proxies for us — to steer and guide. We cannot allow the squandering of budgets and resources to continue, nor attempts to socially engineer outcomes and alter the course of America. We are not perfect in America, and we will make mistakes. We will miss things that are important, and we can and should course correct. But we need to view abuse and manipulative reengineering efforts, especially those that hijack these basics, as treasonous. We must diligently guard and protect our freedoms.

We have allowed ourselves to become consumed by envy and hatred. The economic and social inequities we observe appear to have a solution in an alternative source of government, or taxation on a select few, or combinations of these and other short-sighted solutions.

We need to set aside envy and hatred. We need to recognize that our system of governance has been tested for the past 250 years and, while not perfect, has been foundational to the existence of one of the greatest nations of history. Knee-jerk responses to greed and envy and hatred that aim to replace our system of governance are ill-conceived and intellectually weak, to date.

We need to solve real problems, not contrived ones that pit the haves against the have nots.

We’ve stopped celebrating our differences. But our differences are positives that are worthy of nurturing and celebration.

America was founded on differences. Differences are positives. Race. Religion. Points of view. Likes and dislikes. With these, we innovate and create, we see needs we can individually meet, and we relate individually and collectively.

Our differences do not need to mean incompatibility, but we have taken that viewpoint in the last 25 years, to the detriment of all of us.

Thinking du jour that differences constitute the right to do as we please, and weak mindedness that it is politically incorrect to say “no”, do not celebrate differences. They weaponize them. We’ve seen race, gender, and wealth weaponized. We’ve seen political differences and the laws of our Country reprehensibly weaponized in Orwellian ways to the highest offices of elected and appointed officials and in the operational machines behind them.

There is way too much opportunity to harness and enjoy for us to tolerate the wasted time and small mindedness we have seen displayed on the global stage, as though such thinking is some form of spiritual or moral enlightenment. We need to rise above it. We can rise above it.

Political platforms need to focus on America’s best interests which, at the core, are its people. Political gamesmanship that we have increasingly witnessed should be rejected out of hand as conduct unbecoming all Americans. Those that reduce the American Experiment to a simple game are destined to experience failure. We’ve seen both major political parties in competition with each other to reach the bottom.

We are people who choose to live in the United States. Our choice is an eyes-wide-shut choice, which means: we both see and leverage our differences; we see our imperfections and we both give grace and work to address; we subordinate to our rules of law, honoring them, and preferring to live to them before compromisingly creating special cases to end run around them; we seek to be peace makers and not just peace keepers; and we seek to prosper individually, collectively, and nationally, not just as a socialist experiment damned to fail, but as people in a family who look out for each other through compassion and service, and even sometimes a bit of tough love.

A golden ring worthy of grasping, to be sure, and one with which all of us will require help and grace to collectively obtain. With help, though, we can reach it and go forward as an American family rather than wallow in selfishness and the mire of whatever has become our current reality.