The Recent Ruination of American Exceptionalism

There is less than a week to go before we can start restoring America to its former greatness. Unfortunately the first priority will be to get some control over the coronavirus and by January 20th, and we will have wasted a full year in that endeavor thanks to the recklessness a minority of American voters four years ago who voted for a crass failed businessman to "Make America Great Again." Any critical thinker then could have seen that was a dangerous put-the-tooth-under-the-pillow wish with ten minutes of Google research.

I voted early over a month ago, and although I have done nothing for any campaign this time, unlike in 2016, 2017 and 2018 when I worked hard for democrats, to good success in 2017 and 2018, and clearly the nation's immediate, rapid decline starting in 2017 wasn't because of anything that I left undone in 2016. Because I am in a vulnerable category for the coronavirus, I have chosen not to put myself at risk by working within the confines of a campaign and potentially become a further burden upon our straining health care system by getting sick.  

Also, I have been hearing hospital administrators lately talking about rationing health care and making choices about who to treat because their hospitals have no further capacity. I understand triage and I have no doubt my care would be placed behind that of reckless, maskless young people who got themselves sick by attending packed GOP functions if health care started to be rationed in Trump's America in the face of all the hot spots everywhere. In other words, people over 65 like me would be sent home to die there with no treatment.

I talked my gardener into voting early and he voted for Biden. I talked my neighbor's live-in adult son into voting early and he voted for Biden. This week I talked the young man living at his parents house across the street into promising that he would vote. So I consider that I multiplied my vote by two and a half times.  

I am retired, my 401K has gone down over 60% this year and my social security check was late this month but I have sent a $25 check to 23 democratic incumbents or challengers, mostly senatorial candidates because the soulless grim reaper, aka Moscow Mitch McConnell, has shown us all that true Machiavellian power in the US resides in the senate where a paltry minority of the population can control negatively the lives of the large majority in this country. But I mailed contributions to a few representatives as well like Wendy Davis in TX and Max Rose in NY. I admire Davis because of her heroic efforts in an 18-hour filibuster while trying to block draconian restrictions being put upon a woman's right to control her own body in \Texas a few years back. I am from conservative Staten Island and I wish good luck to the unflappable, feisty Rose!.  

And I put a Biden sign in my yard and on my car. If I ever meet any of my grandchildren, I won't feel totally embarrassed if they complain to me about the total and hopefully not irretrievable ruination of American excellence under Trump.

Less than two weeks out, and closing in on 225,000 deaths

 There's not much to do for the election since I voted last month.  I get text messages asking me to sign up for inside poll watcher training, like I did in 2016, but I resist it since I have more than one comorbidities concerning COVID-19.  I decided I am not going to spend16 hours in a closed space packed with people working and constantly shuffling in and out, it's a younger person's job now to save our tottering republic--I did my best the last presidential election.

I had chatted up one of the two live-at-home sons of my neighbors who had indicated an interest in the election and offered to take him to City Hall to vote in-person early, but he never answered the door when I knocked at the prearranged time.  (The other son, the one who went to college, brusquely said he didn't vote, go figure.)  I saw him last week on the sidewalk and he told me that he had indeed voted the day I knocked, only later, and he had voted for Biden.  Score!

I watched the second debate in its entirety, and clips of the first one, both gave me a headache to see a snarling, mugging bully hector an aging septuagenarian with utter, lying and nonsensical BS.  And I watch the count of American dead mount steadily each day, about to pass 225,000 in a mere eight months, most of them unnecessary if only there had been leadership from the president and a national plan.  As it is, the coronavirus is raging uncontrollably across the land while Nero fiddles, the U.S. is the laughing stock of the world in its ineptitude.

I sit at home, watch the news, go out threesor four  times a week to the store and wait for the virus to be over or quelled.  It's obviously going to be a long wait because absolutely nothing is going to be done to ameliorate the current situation before January 20th, which is still three months away at which time the U.S. under Biden will start at Go, with a full year utterly wasted thanks to the shocking  recklessness of the U.S electorate in 2016 who took a flier on such an obviously utterly unfit candidate and voted him in thanks to the obsolescent electoral college which strips the populous coasts of the power of a democracy's supposed mainstay of one person one vote.  All power flows through the Senate, Mitch McConnell has shown us that with his grim reaping, and every day I send out another $25 check to Democratic senatorial candidates, twenty checks so far.

I can't wait for November 3rd at 7 pm.

Dreams of My Children, or Why I Hate Holidays.

Besides Christmas or Thanksgiving, which cause the heart to bring forth images of family and longing memories of missing loved ones, Columbus Day is the holiday I most dislike.  Nineteen years ago during The Divorce  I brought my children back from a lovely trip to Ohio to visit their cousins and aunt and uncle and that night their mother called Dr. Victor Elion, a charlatan court-house-lounging psychologist who acquired visitation overseeing powers over my visitation thanks to the careless writing of an order by my dreadful then-divorce attorney, to complain that I had brought the children home "tired."  He completely suspended my visitation privileges that night, ex parte, and I wasn't able to restore my rights until after a hearing scheduled two months later and by then, the children had turned against me by application of PAS, a form of brainwashing which immature tender children are especially sensitive to, by their mother and her coterie of agenda-driven hired gun social services "professionals" no better than Dr. Elion.  I remember thinking at the time that 60 days of no communication with my children was heartbreakingly cruel and painful.  What did I know then in my ignorance, I haven't seen nor heard from any of my children in 15 years.

But you don't have to take my word for it.  You could google my name and the name of my oldest son, James Bradley Lamberton, before he changed his name to her name on his eighteenth birthday, and find an opinion by the Virginia appellate court on how that divorce went, which contains phrases like "reprehensible." a "harassment petition" and "unjustified" in describing the actions of the mother during the litigation.  She was assessed sanctions and my costs of just under $50,000 finally which ended the litigation finally after several dreadful soul and money sucking years.

So I hate Columbus Day, it immediately conjures up memories of my lost children and the unfairness men mostly face these days in heartless domestic law courts.  For years I have maintained a public outreach to my children on this very venue, letting them know that on any holiday during which I am home that I would be at a nearby pizzeria to where they grew up during the noon hour and inviting any or all of them to join me so we could, as adults in a loving family, could pick up the threads from this day going forward.  After all, until each one turned 18, I was always at their curbside every other holiday or Friday at 5 pm to undertake my court-ordered visitation and partake in the custody order (full joint legal custody), although they (nor their mother) never answered my cellphone calls to the house and after ten minutes I would drive away to return on the next holiday or twice-monthly Friday.

No one besides a forlorn fellow sufferer in the Arlington Court who I didn't know (I thought she was serving me a subpoena when she approached me in the restaurant as I ate) who was undergoing the very same PAS applications that I suffered from.  She described the same unfair and dreadful undertakings  by the same cast of characters in the case she was associated with, like, in my opinion, the odious and unprofessional Meg Sullivan, LPSW, that in my opinion in conjunction with other hired whore "professionals" extrajudicially cost me my fatherhood.  But I persevere.  Today, even during the pandemic, I parked at noon within sight of the front door of the Lost Dog Restaurant in Westover, donned my mask and checked out the inside quickly and ordered a Polynesian Pie, spent the time it was cooking in my car watching people entering or leaving the front door of the premises, received a text at 12:33 that my pie was ready, watched for a few minutes more then picked up my pie and a few minutes later drove home to enjoy it.  I am sorry for those three, as the fatuous Dr. Elion used to refer to them as, lads, now all adults in their thirties.  What men they should be, that they so easily cast family members out on temptations offered to them by others, even though as young children but now mature adults! 

A Two-fer . . .

Ernesto, who mows my lawn, called me yesterday, which he almost never does.  He's a friend of mine, a Bolivian who has been here for thirty years and a citizen since 2000.  He speaks passable English (I am envious when I sit outside with my next door neighbor occasionally--she is his brother--and those two start speaking together in an indigent dialect from South America which means that they speak three languages, including of of course Spanish, whereas I can only speak one) but he is not fully up on politics in America so I do my best to inform him.

He told me that he had just voted early at City Hall and it only took him five minutes--in and out with no one else there except for the registrar.  He thanked me for informing him of the existence of early voting and where to go and when it was open (M-F 9-5 untill election week) because he wasn't sure otherwise if he would have gone to his local precinct at the elementary school on election day and waited on line during a pandemic to vote otherwise and getting an absentee mail-in ballot was otherwise too cumbersome for him in Virginia (you have to obtain the proper application form, fill it out correctly, send it to the proper place, receive the ballot back, fill that out correctly, including fulfilling properly all the requirements for the return envelope including a proper signature in the right place. and sending it back so it'll arrive in time in an era when the U.S, mail is being deliberately being slowed down by Postmaster Louis DeJoy, a Trump sycophant).

I was gratified to hear from Ernesto because I had offered to take my neighbor, her husband and her two adult children to City Hall to vote when I went  to vote early but they were no shows when I knocked on their door at the prearranged time.  I then issued a standing offer to drive any of them to City Hall during early voting hours but a complicated series of reasons why they had no time to do this whenever I suggested a time made it dawn upon me that although they revile Donald Trump, they were going to vote, if at all, on their own time.

I felt bad that I really had no other plans to work in this election--I am too much in a suspect group health-wise to physically electioneer during a pandemic--besides voting early myself, sending modest checks to democratic senatorial candidates and putting up a Biden sign in my yard.  Receiving Ernesto's call out of the clear blue yesterday was a delight.

I voted . . .

 In these cataclysmic times, I executed my plan to vote on the first day early voting started in Virginia last month, on September 18th.  I drove down to City Hall at 10 am armed with a notice dated in August from my bank which came addressed to me at my residential address indicating that a check I had deposited had in fact been deposited.

I walked in with a face mask on and was met by a sheriff's deputy to whom I announced that I was present to vote.  He directed me towards the city's registrar office without requiring me to go through any security, where there was no there aside from a receptionist behind a plexiglass shield and the registrar and two polling volunteers.  The receptionist asked to see my driver's license whereupon I presented her with my bank account note (Virginia dropped its photo ID law this year after the democrats reclaimed both chambers of the statehouse although it still requires suitable documents) which she examined with a sour face and then handed me a voting slip which I gave to the registrar who gave me a ballot in a folder and a free (the pandemic you know) pen to fill it out with.

The choice for president/VP was easy as were the choices for senator and representative and it took but a second to mark those blank ovals.  I didn't know a single thing about any of the four persons running for three spots on city council so I left those blank and read carefully the two proposed constitutional amendments and marked "yes' on both of those (I'm a democrat you see, and since I discerned through the incomprehensible legalese that they were both measures intent on lessening burdens on poor people and "totally" disabled veterans, in other words giving money away, of course I voted for those), slipped my ballot into the scanning and counting machine and handed my folder back to a volunteer (did she wipe it down for the next voter who showed up?).

I asked if I was the first person there so far and was surprised to hear that 32 other voters had already preceded me that morning and that a third of the registered voters in the city had already made applications for mail-in ballots.  With such a crushing response already in the very first hour of voting seven weeks out from election day it was and remains clear to me that Trump is going to go down in a landslide and the country, and the world, will awaken from this four-year, horrific nightmare.