Elect Bad People, or Don’t Vote at All, and Bad Things Happen

In an over-populated world like ours, one that’s increasingly prone to pandemics, voting for people who don’t believe in government could actually kill off a lot of old folks, like me.

Elect people like Donald Trump, whose administration was perhaps fatally slow off the mark to address coronavirus with totally inadequate testing and a barrage of downplaying rhetoric that fanned a lackadaisical leadership response, and you potentially jeopardize the lives of millions of older Americans.

But the opposite is true as well. Elect people of conscience and good things can happen. It was greatly heartening last week, for instance, to see the morning daily run a front page piece on 40 private attorneys volunteering to work for free in the Bernalillo County DA’s office to help prosecute suspects in thousands of rape cases in Albuquerque that were stymied owing to a huge backlog of rape kits taken from victims but left untested by crime labs sometimes for decades.

Dubbed Project Predator, this generosity is an act of civic heroism on the part of the attorneys. It also reflects the moral tone that voters can indirectly bestow on a community by electing serious people motivated by a healthy public mindedness who set the tone for citizen activism. It just so happens that District Attorney Raul Torrez is a Democrat and that the City of Albuquerque has a Democratic Mayor, Tim Keller who, when he served as state auditor, pointed out three years ago that New Mexico had, according to the Journal, the “highest rate of untested rape kits in the country.”

Elections set the tone. Voting matters. I can’t help but think about how many of us would feel immensely safer if serious people were in control of the Supreme Court and occupying the White House and the U.S. Senate right now. For elders like me nearing 80, people who are particularly vulnerable to the potentially lethal impact of coronavirus, the election of Donald Trump and Mike Pence might actually prove to be a matter of life and death.

I wish that every person in America who doesn’t believe voting matters would think a bit about the catastrophe in the making when people who hate government, and don’t believe in it, are elected to run government, largely because of low voter turnout caused by a childish disenchantment with the ups and downs of democracy itself.

Thank heavens for the “deep state,” for the bureaucracies that keep government functioning, even under the rule of government haters. Trump’s doing his best to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency and has made inroads in undermining even the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which has all but refused help from the Food and Drug Administration’s top expert in the spread of viral contagion, according to the New York Times. But even Trump and his Republican cohort can’t completely wipe out these agencies with their courageous professional staffs who value public service over political servitude.

I find myself thinking that if I and my older friends should come down with COVID-19, what Rush Limbaugh dismisses as “just a common cold,” and are close to death from its invasion of our old pulmonary systems, it won’t be former President Obama’s fault that the U.S. is coming late to the game in the struggle with coronavirus, as President Trump claims, it will be the fault of those government haters and rabid deregulators in the Trump administration who’ve been in power for nearly three and a half years. And, I have to say, it will also partially be the fault of all those who elected Trump and those who chose to sit out the election of 2016.

It’s hard to imagine a worse choice to lead the government’s efforts to contain coronavirus in the United States than Vice President Mike Pence, who has demonstrated a flabbergasting allegiance to ideology over science. Pence, who “has a history of downplaying the link between smoking and lung cancer,” wrote in an op-ed in 2000 that “despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn’t kill,” according to The Verge. Virtually every physician and insurance company in the country, of course, would disagree.

When Pence was governor of Indiana, he delayed a program involving needle exchanges, stimulating the reuse and sharing of infected needles that led to Indiana’s most devastating era of HIV contagion. What lunacy it is to give a man who has no regard for public health the job of protecting the health of the public from what promises to be the first of many such highly dangerous global epidemics.

And despite all the back peddling, amending and “contextualizing” of Trump’s claim that the coronavirus was a “hoax” dreamed up by the Democrats to harm his chances for re-election, I heard him and saw him say it with my own eyes and ears. And so did millions of other Americans. It was a moment of political slapstick that will live on in infamy.

When you elect preposterous people, preposterously bad things are bound to happen. How much more evidence do we need that voting matters?

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it