The $17.50 Candewloupe

DOWN FOR THE COUNT?

At first glance the melon looks like a white honeydew. But look again and the skin is not honeydew smooth but pebbled like a cantaloupe.

Inside the supermarket there are sample cubes of this melon with little cups and toothpicks. The color is neither orange nor green…but a pale refection of both. The fragrance is so perfumed you can smell it ten feet away. It tastes like nothing you have ever experienced. It is a very special melon indeed.

And then you look at the price: $17.50 for a melon.

Who is going to spend that kind of money for one melon when you can buy both a honeydew and a cantaloupe for maybe eight dollars if they are on sale?

And there is the rub for the Biden Administration…stuck between three political factions: desires of “more” from Congressional Democratic progressives who want a 3.5 trillion dollar social infrastructure bill and a 1.5 trillion dollar physical infrastructure bill to fix roads and bridges and won’t vote to pass that one unless they get the larger one too; a smaller group of moderate or centrist Democrats who can’t imagine passing a 3.5 trillion dollar bill for any purpose: and nothing from the Republicans who just say NO to everything…although there is enough bipartisan agreement on fixing roads and bridges if the progressives stop holding it hostage.

In a Senate that is Democrat by one vote, where is Biden going to find 60 votes to pass both bills without getting rid of the filibuster which he doesn’t have the votes or the will to do? It seems that the future of his entire Administration is at stake and that no workable answers are available.

Biden had eight years as Vice President to Barack Obama’s Presidency to get used to Republican obstruction. But it’s quite another thing to find significant problems within his own party with those involved holding fast to their ideological beliefs.

Knowing the many legislators who support a bill to spend money on our deteriorating highways and bridges, the Administration has managed to put together the infrastructure bill in a well-executed bipartisan campaign that the Senate passed and sent to the House. But Nancy Pelosi, aware that the 95 Democratic progressives in the House will vote against the infrastructure bill if it is not accompanied by the larger social development bill, has decided to wait for some kind of miracle though she knows the votes aren’t there even from some Democrats.

Who is playing what kind of game here?

WHAT MONEY CAN BUY

The general consensus is that Joe Biden is a one-term President.

If that is true in his mind as well, we can understand why he is supporting the Bernie Sanders effort to fix America’s deep shortcomings with an attempt to genuinely provide child care support for working families, climate control mitigation, education from start to finish, all the holes that exist in America’s healthcare coverage…all at once. Hence 3.5 trillion dollars…reduced from an original proposal of $6 trillion according to Sanders.

Is Biden dreaming of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and War on Poverty? Those were policies that offered well-meaning major social reforms including Head Start which not only helped preschool children in poverty areas across the country but gave jobs to Black teachers in numbers unknown in America.

If so, two things are true.

First, LBJ had a Senate and House dominated by Democrats. He would lose that domination when he supported and passed the Voting Rights Act and lost the Democrat South…but he owned their votes until then. Joe Biden has none of that.

And second, we must study the progressive agenda and question where present programs are working. For instance, tax credits for working parents needing child care sounds reasonable until one wonders how that will be monitored and controlled and whether enough child care workers exist, and whether they are capable and what kind of salaries will work.

Universal pre-K for three and four year olds sounds right if they are quality programs. We know what quality means. We do not know whether any of the existing programs throughout the country actually work. When they do, they are just right. When they don’t, they are little more than baby-sitting and can cause harm and delay. Will anybody ever try to find out?

Free tuition for community colleges makes sense and gives millions a chance at a college education which can be expanded to four year degrees. But the drop-out rate in community colleges has been 50% for years and years. What will work to change this result? Certainly not free tuition.

America’s healthcare policies make it the most expensive in the World and wide-open to fraud and manipulation. Adding free glasses, some dental work and free rides to the doctor will not improve any of that. Certainly not billions more to Medicare and Medicaid without improving the quality of both.

Is there a reality to mediating climate change at this moment in time? One can argue both ways. It is too late or we can control the World’s greenhouse gases from fossil fuels that have produced the fires, floods and perhaps Covid-19.

All of these progressive programs stuffed into the 3.5 trillion dollar bill deserve help but not without careful consideration of realities that exist.

Must they all be tried at once? Aren’t they each worth a legislative bill and price tag?

And if handled this way would centrist Democrats like Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia (a coal mine owner who earned half a million dollars from it) and Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona begin to support rather than hold up these efforts to improve life in America?

A good supermarket manager would see those candewloupes sitting unsold, cut them up into cubes, package them in plastic containers and sell them for a lot less per purchase – and make a bigger profit

THE DEMOCRAT’S INNER WAR

No matter what the field of endeavor there is in life a kind of private inner dance that sees people move up and onward and then, in time, out— giving the next generation its turn at the introduction of new ideas, energy, maturity and control.

When that doesn’t happen in the private corporate world as well as in the public world of politics and government – things can get “sticky” and instead of working together in that ‘dance’ the generations pull apart.

It is no accident that the era of “youth” in politics has been over for some years. From JFK through Clinton, the Democratic Party essentially proposed young men in their late 40’s and fifties as Presidential candidates. Those proposals mirrored the young men and a few women who were leading major corporations in that same age bracket.

But something changed and in recent years America has been voting for older men for President…at ages never considered before.

The generations haven’t moved on as expected in the private sector nor in the public sector as well.

It seems that America no longer has the same kind of confidence in itself or in the younger men and women seeking leadership at the very top.

And yet there are signs that it is changing.

Democratic progressives in Congress – 95 of them – are much younger men and women then in recent years. While they are led by an older man – Bernie Sanders who continues to speak for them – it is obvious that younger people are coming to the foreground.

A look at the New York City Council confirms that – so does an increasing number of younger men and women in the State Assembly and Senate.

What is obvious is this: the failures of public education which we have discussed for decades, has produced a level of fundamental ignorance about government, policy formation and historical data (if you don’t learn from the past, you will repeat it) that does not promise strength, quality and even simple common sense.

Programs are not slogans though slogans are easier to create.

“Defund the Police” from Black Lives Matter ignores that most of the crime in our big cities takes place in the black community. Where will the protection come from?

A Green New Deal demands an end to the use of fossil fuels as energy producers. But the fossil fuel industry, like the Big Pharma in the prescription drug industry, controls Congress…buys the votes it need. Who will end that reality?

And simply to demand that Rikers Island be closed and every criminal be freed is not a reasonable answer to conditions there.

And yet these are ‘progressive’ anthems.

Living in the reduced World of a pandemic makes feeling pessimistic too natural for comfort.

We are a great nation because our people have always found ways to work together just enough to make that greatness an historical fact.

The World continues to come to our borders seeking a future. No other country can indicate that “good luck”.

There are reasons for America to be sought out and they can still be valid though after more than 300 years we need deep reconsiderations of who and what we are…even in this politically divided country.

If our citizens remain so uneducated and so fundamentally ignorant of what is necessary to govern and be governed, so uncertain about the nature of our society that they genuinely cannot understand the difference between facts and continued lies – our future is behind us.

Today we see struggles in education due to a pandemic that has put education on the front pages. Now we see how critical education can be. Great concerns over health has caused mass chaos over whether schools should be open, whether teachers should be vaccinated, whether mask wearing is critical to safety and to continued education in school.

This problem has been politicized as so much of America has been. But this much is obvious: we risk losing an entire generation of Americans and perhaps our future unless we not only keep our children in school but provide them with a much, much, much better education than we are now doing.

Will we now value the importance of teachers as we never have before? Will we provide them with the teacher training that has been absent for two generations? Will their degrees and certification enable them to step in and teach and so demand the salaries and benefits they can genuinely deserve and not because a union threatens a strike?

It is not American politicians or political parties or candidates or sitting Presidents who are at risk in this internal war we are in: it is America itself.