RESOLVING MY POLITICAL DILEMMA

As someone who has supported concepts that are standard in Canada, Cuba, England and most all the democracies in Western Europe, this year’s presidential politics is mind-boggling. 

Free health care is available in all these countries. Their life expectancy is higher than ours. Higher education is available for free to all if they qualify academically, and the gap between income levels, for the richest and the poorest are far less significant than it is in America, and these are issues that are important to me.

At the same time the leading presidential contenders in both parties, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, do not propose any of these changes at all. Theirs is a race between two candidates whose trustworthiness levels, according to all polls, is far less than 50% among all eligible voters. 

Both candidates can fire away at each other, making it seem as if this is the most important election in the history of our nation. If you are fed up with conventional politics and like to listen to an egotist with no governmental experience, who won’t release his tax returns, Trump, is surely your man, even if he changes his opinions constantly so one doesn’t know what he really stands for, other than being an “outsider.”

On the other hand if you want to vote for an “insider,” a canny politician, who also does not support these issues that I value, who is a hawk, and refuses to share what she said when giving a speech to Goldman Sachs that netted her a quarter of a million dollars as a speaking fee from this Wall Street investment firm, who supports fracking, has continuously supported U.S. military intervention throughout the world, and who plays racial politics, courting Latinos and African-American voters (usually older) instead of economic issues, then Hillary is your woman.

Each, of course, contends that the other would radically change the course of America. Somehow I find I have difficulty believing this. Do any of you share this feeling? 

While Bernie Sanders articulates these programs, I vote not for the man, but for his ideas that mirror mine. Yet the vast majority of the democratic Super-delegates, establishment politicians all, who have not been elected by voters but have, by and large, allowed our country to deteriorate, will cast the deciding votes that will put Hillary (and Bill, her husband)  over the top at the Democratic Convention. All the more surprising because all polls show that Sanders has a much bigger lead over Trump than does Mrs. Clinton.

Being born in 1934, I do know that in this election I don’t want to support the lesser of two evils. As I’ve said before, if one had to choose between Hitler and Mussolini, who would you take before the Second World War began? (I asked this in an earlier blog and most people preferred Mussolini for whatever that’s worth). But I’m not playing that game again.

This past weekend I saw an old friend, Karl Grossman, a Polk Award winning investigative reporter at a large gathering here in Sag Harbor at the home of David Alpern and his wife Sylvia. We published two of Karl’s books that had a major impact: Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed to know About Nuclear Power in 1981 and The Poison Conspiracy in 1982, which were both acclaimed, and led to his becoming a widely booked lecturer around this country and abroad. Both of us, as political junkies, discussed  these very same issues while nourishing ourselves with good food and drink, and it turned out that Karl and I have decided to vote, as a protest, for the Libertarian party candidate, because of the absence of trust we had for the two major party choices.

I welcome your responses.


Marty