Two Old Guys

I can say old because I’m 80, 81 in June. Biden is 81. Trump turns 78 very soon. Both are old. So am I.

We old people have experience, areas of expertise, methods of getting along with others, and working toward common goals. Personal goals have lesser influence on our lives as we age. There is, after all, only relationships that last and continue to nurture well as we age. Not money. Not things. Only people and what we relish with relationships encountered.

One area of my expertise is generating new small businesses, especially nonprofits. The latter are supported by volunteer labor, leadership, and funding. They accomplish things because they are dedicated to a common mission. They thrive on that. They respect one another and rely on each other to accomplish their objectives. This is shared life, not manipulated.

In American governance, there were large eras of cooperation and respect among the elected and appointed officials. Not today, and not for most of the last 40 years. Adversarial politics is what we have today. And in my humble opinion, it needs to stop.

The current political atmosphere creates hostility, manipulates facts, downright lies, and disrupts working relationships that frustrate solving common problems. This is fundamentally unhealthy for our nation. Any nation, really.

To solve that situation, we need to attract new, younger people into our governance structure. Help them understand how government works at all levels, find specialties of operations to gain expertise, and dare to examine society’s problems to determine the priority of improvements, the interaction of other problems with each other, and create solid options to solve governance problems. This takes time. this takes nurture. This is a healthy process toward building a governance structure with talented people, depth of knowledge, and ability to succeed older participants over time.

In short, America does not have a succession plan for its government, Federal for certain, probably most states have this same issue to deal with. We need to encourage people to enter the political institutions, not discourage them. Why should anyone place themselves and their families as targets of competing political powers? It is insulting and often dangerous. Politicians and their families need our support if we are going to encourage them and others to take up our public works.

It is OK to be old. It is even OK to be old in office, but when we have only the elderly to rely on, we put at risk our common good. Trump is nearly as old as Biden. The age is not the issue. The reliance on possible disruption of service by incapacity or death, is the issue. Even that is OK if succession has been working and we have good people to take up the role of deceased officials. I doubt that is the case today. And that is a sad condition we voters have allowed to happen.

Luckily, we have the power and opportunity to correct that every election day. Please bear this in mind when preparing your vote.

March 11, 2024

 

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