Biden Time

So I've been watching Emma McAdam (Therapy in a Nutshell) videos on YouTube, scatter-shotting her 30 week course on anxiety, and last night I skipped way ahead to the 29th week, which reminded me about purpose and meaning being found in giving back, bringing to life ourselves what we want from it, and from others.

Belonging, connection, caring.

I want people to behave more responsibly so I've decided to help out on our housing association again. It's something I can do that I'm good at, like blogging, but more practical and local community oriented.

I've been engaging a bit with a couple of Facebook friends on the situation facing the Democratic Party right now with regard to Joe Biden and whether he should step aside. It's interesting because I'm quite partisan and have a heaping helping of confirmation bias but I've actually come around to adjusting my opinion on this.

They say the best time to plant a tree was 50 years ago. The second best time is now.

So to make the analogy, the best time to start laying the groundwork for a transition in leadership was in 2020. The next best time is now. Yes, it's late in the day, and it will be a scramble and a gamble. But so is doing nothing. And at the end of the day, Americans who believe in democracy will just have to unite around whoever replaces Joe Biden, and get out the vote to defeat Donald Trump.

Again.

And they'll have to make up for the Republicans, who no longer believe in democracy, who are indecent, and who cheat, in order to put Kamala Harris over the top. Because yes, go big or go home. Trust in the American people to want leadership, not despotism.

Have faith.

It's hard, though, isn't it. Our housing association had a coup of sorts a few years ago now where a fellow (a Rightwing bully and vocal Trump supporter even though Canadian) muscled out more decent members and installed a couple of his cronies to more or less do whatever the hell he wanted, joint use agreement be damned. I'd worked with him before and always managed to rein him in, with the help of another member, but it was too hard to do anything about him from outside the committee and the other member was long gone to Toronto.

In the end our association managed, all of us together, to get him out, fire the property management company that had benefited financially from his reign of terror, and restore order, although a lawyer advised us that the unauthorized changes he'd made shouldn't simply be reversed, as it wouldn't be righting wrongs, it would be making yet more unauthorized changes.

Whatever.

So we lived with what he'd done and life carried on. Some people were mad but some people are always mad, and a new committee and property management company, which I helped hire and which turned out to be much worse than the previous one, managed to take us through the pandemic until last fall when the committee mostly resigned and a new committee was elected in its place, shortly after which most of them resigned so that now it's half unelected volunteers, of which I've offered to be one.

Everybody and everything everywhere is fucked up and we aren't giving each other the due we deserve for trying to sort shit out and restore order. Living in Ottawa I can tell you we ceded public space to the likes of the Freedom Convoy and we're having a hell of a time taking it back because the decent among us have mostly retreated to our private domains, naively believing the public one isn't our problem.

It is both our problem and our solution so we need to get back out there and reclaim it.

Yes, Joe Biden did his duty well, but the people calling for him to pass the torch are doing their duty, too. I know what I see, in spite of my own denials, and I see the Joe Biden referred to some time ago now in a written report by a doctor as elderly and confused. A Joe Biden who slurs his speech so badly he's too hard to understand. A Joe Biden who can't turn his head without turning his body. A Joe Biden who moves like Tim Conway playing an old man in a Carol Burnett Show sketch.

A Joe Biden who's tired and cranky and instead of taking a nap is insisting on running for President of the United States.

It's the obstinacy, the anger, the feeling betrayed - the paranoia - that gave it away for me. Joe Biden, Mr. Reasonable, isn't being reasonable. He's not the only one who can defeat Trump just because he managed to do it in 2020. And so the task of convincing him to make as gracious an exit as possible is being left to people other people are excoriating for taking it on, as if Democrats can't be trusted to vote for a ticket with the accomplished Kamala Harris as the nominee. Meanwhile, I'm reading my young middle-aged Facebook friend in Texas vow he'll vote for the elderly man with signs of dementia over Trump, thanks, and do his best to convince others to do the same, and not sit it out or pretend it's hopeless because the task at hand is saving democracy.

Like I say, it's hard, but once I checked my partisanship, my confirmation bias, I felt a lot calmer about it all. Also, recognizing it's not up to me to save America, it's not even up to Joe Biden, it's up to Americans. Meanwhile, I can do something to improve my own little corner of Canada, which will go a long way towards making me feel better.

Emma McAdam points out that when we stop doing what makes us anxious it just confirms to our brain that what we were doing was dangerous. Well being on the committee isn't dangerous, going to see a musical at the National Arts Centre isn't dangerous, taking the train to visit relatives isn't dangerous, meeting friends for lunch isn't dangerous, doing my part to take back public space isn't dangerous.

The stuff of life isn't dangerous.

My belief is Joe Biden will step aside and I hope he does so graciously and with a humble apology for not having done so sooner because he needs to do what he can to absolve of blame the people he's put in the position of appearing to push him out.

My hope is Democrats rally around the new ticket and people get involved on the ground to get out the vote like democracy depends on it because it does. Meanwhile, I'm going to go back and forth viewing Emma McAdam videos on YouTube and put into practice her advice on dealing with anxiety by doing a little more each day to bring to this life what I want from it.

I survived a pandemic ffs. The best time to pay it forward was yesterday. The next best time is right now.