Super Tuesday Tempest

As I sit here dividing my post-Super Tuesday morning between writing this article, watching Cartoon Network,  The Arts Channel, CNN (Yes, T.J. Holmes.), and listening to the unseasonable and incessant wailing of tornado sirens, I find that I am simultaneously encouraged and wearied by my country and its politics.  

On the one hand, I am so proud that such a motley assortment of politicians would find a viable place in the running for their parties’ presidential nomination.  We have a Mormon, an evangelical Christian, and a septuagenarian former prisoner of war—all purporting to be the most conservative of Republican nominees.  And on the Democratic side, we have a woman and a Black man who seem to share more similar than dissimilar ideas.

That brings me to the other hand.  I am no less than disappointed and not just a li’l pissed that any of these attributes, as I have named them, would be food for consideration in electing the next Leader of the Free World.  For the life of me, I cannot fathom what the Latter Day Saints, W.W.J.D., military heroics and misfortune, gender, or ill-conceived social categorizations based on not-really-specific phenotypic traits and real or perceived genetic and cultural heritage has to do with determining whether or not a person is worthy to become the President of the United States.

The inconvenient truth is that, while we entertain notions of the United States as a pluralistic society and wear those thoughts as a badge when it makes us feel more enlightened than a few non-Westerners, we have yet to elect a leader who effectively represents our purported pluralistic values.  Nor, do we demand great things from our great leaders.  Even now, too many of our presidential candidate nominees assert their merit by employing the same ole hackneyed cultural codes and subversive rhetoric as those who preceded them.  

The reality is that—in our struggle for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—we, the people of the United States, have long been our greatest stumbling block, a nemesis more dangerous than any terrorist threat.  My prayer is that we will choose to control the prejudices, selfishness and apathy that hinder our path toward much needed reform, and, in this next election, appoint a leader that affirms to our posterity and to all creation that we are a land of free and foward thinkers, a brave superpower willing and able to mend our flaws before an ever-skrinking world and embrace progressive social revolution from sea to shining sea.