To the lifeboats. It's everyone for themselves

Which one of them to vote for? Who the hell knows? It's everyone for themselves this time around.

Iran vs Iraq

In 12 days, I’ll make my way to a polling station in Bannock County, ID, to cast a vote for, among other things, the next president of the United States. I still don’t know who I’m going to vote for. I know who I won’t vote for, but for whom I will is still up in the air.

Under no circumstances will I cast a vote for the Harris/Walz ticket. Kamala Harris is everything that’s bad about identity politics. She’s the epitome of every empty suit in a boardroom or university lecture hall. She stumbled into contention for leader of the free world by way of an unmeritorious path of patronage and gender/class/racial-based advancement. A vote for Harris is, more than anything, stamping an imprimatur of approval on DEI. No can do.

And her running mate, Tim Walz. Where did they find that bozo? The fact that the Democrats chose him says a lot.

Our other choice is Donald Trump. I’ve slagged Trump here on Howlin’ so many times as a proviso before taking up for him that it’s a running joke among some of you. And it’s true. He’s an unserious, lazy boor who, without a pile of inherited money and a TV show, would be taken seriously by almost no one. But the only people in politics who scare me more than Trump are his enemies, who aren’t about to let anything as inconsequential as the Bill of Rights or the rule of law get in their way.

So my vote will either be for Trump or a write-in. Right now it’s 50-50. I won’t make up my mind until I’m in the voting booth, hoping for divine guidance until the last possible moment.

But I’m not here today to either share my angst with you. Well, OK, maybe a little. Mostly, I’m here to tell you that no matter what you decide, it’s OK with me. This is a difficult choice for me, and I suspect many of you as well. If you come down in a different spot, that’s just fine. I get it.

No one needs any approbation from the likes of me over this anyway. All I’m saying is that I understand what a difficult choice this is for a lot of people. I don’t assume ill intent if you decide differently from me. Unlike partisans, I refuse to make a character-based moral judgement about you tied to either of these two idiots. I think that you’ve put as much thought and soul-searching into this as me. All I have to share is my own confusion. That hardly makes me a sage.

No matter which side wins, I think that we are screwed for the next four years. I just hope that nothing that a government running on pure inertia can’t address comes up.

With Harris, we get a leader that will, first and foremost, make sure that any response to the next coronavirus, rogue asteroid, or world war is an equity-based word salad. The only potential calamity that I feel comfortable having Harris confront is the arrival of a hostile alien species. After the take me to your leader bit, I’m pretty sure that they’d beat it out of the solar system as quickly as possible.

With Trump, I’m sure that it will be the revenge tour. Will Trump attempt to suborn the levers of government to punish his many enemies? Almost certainly. Will he succeed? I doubt it. We’ve been the most stable democracy in the world for a quarter of a millennium. I’m confident in the safeguards built into our government by the founding fathers and 250+ years of experience in dealing with public officials who were nimrods. I think that we’ll be OK. Ask me in about a month.

So, friends, this time it’s everyone for themselves. Good luck. I hope that we all come out of this OK. I’ve always thought that the strength of our country isn’t inside the DC Beltway; it’s on Main Streets, farm fields, factories, offices, and homes all across America. The nice thing about such a decentralized model of civic strength is that it’s much harder to kill.

I’ll see you on the other side.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on Twitter @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com.