If you broaden your lens and look toward Washington, what makes you feel better, more secure, inspired? What makes you feel safer, as if there’s a way out or a path through? Anything?
There’s something I’ve been trying to write for a few weeks but can’t get my hands around—but it’s as if there’s no president, it’s an empty White House, nobody’s really there, it’s not an administration but an eccentric event that causes clamor. I’ve never had that feeling before, that a White House is empty and weightless. The media, whose job it is to hold it to account, are distrusted. A Knight Foundation-Gallup survey released this week showed 86% of Americans seeing “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of political bias in news coverage. The Democrats can’t agree on what they’re running on beyond “We’re Not Trump, ” which may or may not be enough, with a presidential candidate age 77 who sometimes seems confused. People can’t even be confident the election will work, that it will be orderly, that the old rough integrity of the system will hold. They know there will likely be no “election night” with states called and a winner declared. But will there be an election week? Month?
When you look toward Washington it’s not solid ground, it’s more shifting sand.
And so the mood this charged summer of ’20: Everyone’s scared, everyone’s trying to figure out where safety is, everyone’s afraid of making a mistake.
You aren’t alone. The whole vast middle of the country now is a Coalition of the Worried.
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