Point of View: In Hopes of Redress

Now that Brett Kavanaugh no longer has to defend himself against Christine Blasey Ford’s allegation of sexual assault, he can get on with screwing us. 

It’s been a long time coming, and were it not he it would have been someone else with equally illiberal views. It is supposed to be a liberal country, you know, inasmuch as we pay no fealty to a king (though maybe to movie and TV stars and pro athletes) or slink about whispering under the thumb of a dictator, but rather are supposed to make of ourselves a commonwealth of purposeful individuals, checking the swings the pendulum may make toward anarchy on the one hand or statism on the other. The idea, I take it, was that if power were to reside with the citizenry — with citizens sufficiently aware of the ways power could be abused — it might through the holding of frequent elections be sufficiently diffused. 

We have one such election coming soon, and let’s hope that there will be some redress, some righting of the ship, the minority party now controlling the Supreme Court as well as the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the presidency, the latter office having become pretty much synonymous with the abuse of power. 

To help turn the tide, my wife has been knocking on a lot of doors lately on behalf of Perry Gershon, a voice of reason amidst the turmoil that seems to surround us. I told her she had met more people in the past few weeks than I had in my entire reportorial career. At least it seems that way. Of the two of us, she is more the political animal, as it were, eager to exchange ideas with others, more willing than I to listen, and to reflect, more concerned with the well-being of all, and more sensitive — even to the point of becoming physically affected — to injustices, which, of course, abound. My late mother called her “a great cheerer-upper,” and she is, genuine in her hope that in this society, in this world, we can do better by one another.

She said not to single her out, as I was about to, when her candidate won the Democratic primary here not long ago, that her contributions had been negligible, that she was just one person in a large, and well-organized, effort throughout the district. All right. I am encouraged, then, that there are many like her, that she isn’t the only one who would like to restore checks and balances to a society that has become warped. Judy D’Mello wrote recently that there are encouraging signs too among the 18 to 24-year-olds. Maybe they’ll vote in big numbers this year, availing themselves of absentee ballots.

I hope that this country will eventually live up to its promise, that it will become less stratified, more egalitarian when it comes to wealth, race, and class, and, yes, even more inspiring when it comes to according to everyone the chance to be the best they can be.