While people are saying, “Peace and safety,” destruction will come on them suddenly, as labor pains on a pregnant woman, and they will not escape. 1 Thessalonians 5:3 (NIV)
Lately, former President Donald Trump has doubled down on how much people seemed to like his notion of Dictator for a Day, just so he can build the border wall to the south with Mexico and start drilling for oil again. The current Biden Administration has started to do both, without admitting there was ever a problem with having not done either in the over three and a half years they have held the reigns in the White House.
Vice President Kamala Harris, on the other hand, has started running toward the middle of the American electorate with her new VP running mate, and 30 (give or take) time visitor to communist China Tim Walz from Minnesota.
As to catch phrases, words like "freedom", "democracy", and "republic" are out. New words like "vibe(s)", and "weird"--most often used to describe looks and behaviors associated with Republicans are in. Who doesn't like a good vibe? I'm a Christian and nearly all of my friends are Christian. I go to church with them, and have many pleasant, meaningful, even deep conversations with a lot of them. Almost all of them give me a great vibe. I hope they feel the same about me.
When I see the phrase "vibe" applied to a conversation about American politics, it sort of makes me worry and makes me cringe a bit. My first thought is that not enough deep thinking, cross-referencing or researching of any kind is going on here. Advertising key words, and emotions have won over common sense and intelligence.
It's not unique to Democrats, either. Republicans and Democrats are paying hundreds of millions, even billions, of dollars to get people to feel a certain way about their party's candidates at every level. This election cycle, young people, especially millenials, and Gen Z are being sought out for the first time, and the campaign is being effective. Boomers traditionally the largest voting block might be out-numbered by them for the first time this year.
In my last essay, I decried that the four people running for President and Vice President were the best we could line up out of 330+ million Americans. These in a nation still looked up to by some as the beacon of light, freedom, hope, and a model for change for one's own country. So much so that people will flee to us by the tens of thousands daily to get a taste of our life. We used to help them model our life on their soil with the right direction. Not so much anymore. If you want to see what failed open border policy looks like these days, look at Europe, especially Great Britain.
Vice President Harris has recently declared that price controls on groceries will be an economic point of her campaign and presidency, playing to people who are hurting over choices on what to spend money on during this time of inflation, and possible recession. The trouble with this is that price controls on groceries--already low profit margin goods--will effect drastically all the other things in the supply chain that get the products to the stores.
It will, as it always does in the socialist economies that do it, result in very high prices, followed by food shortages, higher fuel prices, transportation, and wage costs, throughout the supply chain. The VIBE is great, though. Socialists, people who think emotionally without knowing the history of these failed practices already love it.
But this definitely plays better than the Dictator for a Day Trump's Politics of Grievance, or J.D. Vance's attacks on Tim Walz's military service record. Vance is doing a fine job fronting as Trump's attack dog, since Trump can't really do it himself, never having served while many his age did in Viet Nam. Not to mention, his conflation of the civilian Presidential Medal of Freedom with the Congressional Medal of Honor. This is a fact Trump seems to dismiss as easily as he misunderstands the Constitution, and his ability to communicate on X/Twitter.
I know many veterans, myself included, who held their nose--some twice--while voting for Trump, who will do so no longer just for this slight.
We have many, many problems that require serious, long range solutions and partisan hacks aren't going to get it done. The do nothing Congresses of the last 16 years are leading us down a garden path to ruin. Republican or Democrat make no difference anymore. Visionaries are the required answer to prayer for our republic.
Government has long ceased being the moral arbiter of the nation. It is an ineffective joke. Greed and corruption in the Beltway is no longer a hidden secret. It is out on public display, and splashed across the internet for our friends and enemies around the world to capitalize on. And they do so daily.
We need to ask ourselves what kind of country we want to live in in five, ten, twenty years, and just how much involvement we want those elected officials and their minions in Washington to have over us. We don't need a dictator. In many respects, we've had one in some form or fashion for decades.
Maybe "Vibes" are all we have left. If this is so, America is indeed in serious trouble.
