This Should Be Biden’s Bumper Sticker
He will
need a simple, clear message to counter Trump’s “Make America Great Again”
trope.
Opinion
Columnist
·
June 30, 2020
I almost — but not quite — feel sorry
for Donald Trump. He’s at war with two “invisible enemies” at once — the
coronavirus and Joe Biden — and both remain highly elusive, the pathogen by
nature and the politician by design.
Biden, who made a rare public
appearance on Tuesday, has been wise to stay out of sight. Trump is now in a
full-on race to the bottom with himself, pushing uglier and uglier positions
that appeal to smaller and smaller segments of the American public. Why get in
his way?
Of course, eventually Biden will debate
the incumbent and will need a simple, clear message to counter Trump’s tired
“Make America Great Again” trope.
I have an idea for Biden’s bumper
sticker.
As
I think about what kind of president Biden wants to be and what kind of
president America needs him to be, the slogan that comes to mind was suggested
to me by the environmental innovator Hal Harvey. Harvey didn’t know he was
suggesting it; he just happened to sign off a recent email to me by writing:
“Respect science, respect nature, respect each other.”
I thought — wow, that’s a perfect
message for Biden, and for all of us. It summarizes so simply the most
important values Americans feel that we’ve lost in recent years and hope to
regain from a post-Trump presidency.
Biden should highlight his commitment
to all three values in every speech and interview he gives. They draw such a
clear, simple and easy to remember contrast with Trump.
Start with respecting science. Trump’s
obvious disdain for truth-telling is annoying when he exaggerates his crowd
sizes, his hand sizes, the size of his bank account or the size of his election
victory.
But his disdain for science has become
fatal, as we’re seeing in this widening pandemic. Trump has gone from offering
quack remedies, like disinfectant, ultraviolet light and hydroxychloroquine, to
mocking people, including Biden, for adopting the easiest and most
scientifically proven method for limiting the spread of the coronavirus:
wearing a face mask.
The
pro-Trump governor of Arizona, where the virus is now spiraling out of control,
at one point actually barred local officials from mandating that residents wear
masks. That’s as crazy as when Trump declared, “If we stop testing right now,
we’d have very few cases, if any.”
Think about that: Stop testing. Then
we’ll have no knowledge. Then we’ll have no numbers. Then we’ll have no virus.
Why didn’t I think of that?
Stop
testing people for drunken driving, and then we’ll have no more drunken
drivers. Stop arresting people for shootings, and then the crime rate will go
down.
Attention, fellow Americans, this
impugning of scientific methods, this embrace of conspiracy theories, this
undermining of truth and data by our president and vice president — this is not
happening in other countries. This is not happening in Germany, France, China,
South Korea, Denmark, Canada, Israel or Japan. This is a form of American
“exceptionalism” that we never imagined possible.
We’re not leading. We’re not following.
We’re lost.
“This is Dark Ages stuff,”
remarked Harvey, founder of Energy
Innovation. “A prime difference between the Enlightenment and the
Dark Ages is respect for knowledge, respect for science. The whole idea of
progress requires objectively looking at problems, finding and testing
solutions, and then spreading and using the best of them. That’s how we grow,
that’s how we learn, that’s how we prosper.”
Indeed, it is amazing to think that in
the year 2020 Biden could actually run for president with an ad that says: “I
believe in the Enlightenment, Newtonian physics and the Age of Reason. The
other guy doesn’t.”
As
for respecting nature, that has two meanings. The first is to respect the power
of nature, which Trump has utterly failed to do. She doesn’t negotiate. You
cannot seduce her or sue her. She does whatever chemistry, biology and physics
dictate. Full stop. Which means in a pandemic that she will just keep infecting
people — relentlessly, mercilessly, silently and exponentially — until she runs
out of people to infect or a vaccine or exposure makes enough of us immune. She
also doesn’t keep score. She’ll make you sick and then blow down your house
with a tornado.
Trump’s lack of respect for nature may
be a political asset for him with his base, but it’s been a disaster for the
country. He has built no coordinated national strategy against a virus that
demands coordination — because the virus evolved to exploit any cracks in your
personal or communal immune system, and it pays no heed to the Oklahoma-Texas
borderline.
Respect for nature also means
understanding that we live on a hard rock called planet Earth with a thin cover
of oceans and topsoil, enveloped by a thin layer of atmosphere. Abuse that
soil, junk up those oceans with plastics, distort that atmospheric blanket and
we will likely (further) destroy the perfect Garden of Eden that has been the
basis of all human civilization.
And remember, as bad as this pandemic
is, it’s just training wheels for the big, irreversible atmospheric pandemic:
climate change.
The latest evidence? See National Geographic online:
“An extended heat wave that has been baking the Russian Arctic for months drove
the temperature in Verkhoyansk, Russia — north of the Arctic Circle — to 100.4
degrees F on June 20, the official first day of summer in the Northern
Hemisphere.” That’s 100 degrees in the Arctic!
Respect each other? That’s not so easy
in the midst of our other pandemic — a pandemic of incivility. You cannot
exaggerate the impact on the whole civic culture of having a president who has
elevated name-calling, denigration and lying to a central feature of his
presidency, amplified by the White House.
We have social networks whose business
model is to elevate and spread the most enraged voices from the far right and
the far left, and generally bring out the worst in people. Almost every day now
some public figure, or just everyday American, has to apologize for some inane
or hurtful tweet.
But
this pandemic of incivility is fed by many sources. We have white police
officers who feel such a sense of impunity that one of them kept his knee on a
Black man’s neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds while people were recording
him on their phones.
We have a level of inequality that is
so endemic that your ZIP code is now a better predictor of life expectancy than
your genetic code. Respecting each other means ensuring each other’s equal
access to the American dream — and right now, Black, Hispanic and white
Americans are climbing very different housing, education and health care
ladders, which simply has to be fixed.
And we have a mad gun culture that has
way too many young men thinking respect can come from the barrel of a gun.
Minneapolis has witnessed over 100 people shot since the
death of George Floyd on May 25 — a lot of it gang-related.
We have so many important issues to
discuss among ourselves right now, but for that discussion to be productive we
can’t just go from justifiable outrage straight to firings, public shamings or
disbanding police departments — without pausing for respectful dialogue and
moral distinctions.
I don’t know what is sufficient to get
more people respecting one another, but I know two things that are necessary.
One is a president who every day models respect rather than denigration. That’s
Biden’s job.
The other is getting people out of
Facebook and into each other’s faces again — not to shout or denounce, but to
listen. It’s important what you learn when you listen. It’s even more
important what
you say when you listen. Listening is a sign of respect. And it is amazing what
people will let you say to them if they first think that you respect them.
That’s our job.
Respect science, respect nature, respect each
other. Biden 2020.
It’s the only way to make America great
again.
