I was going to tell you that I am seventy years old and this is the most important election in my lifetime.
I was going to tell you that I voted when Lyndon Johnson was sending young men my age to Vietnam because his Best And Brightest assured him we would Win.
They slaughtered tens of thousands of us.
We slaughtered hundreds of thousands of them.
We didn’t Win.
But this is the most important election in my lifetime.
I was going to tell you that I voted during the Nixon years as that bloody war raged on. But the rage had spread to our own streets, and national guardsmen were shooting young people down on a college campus.
But this is the most important election of my lifetime.
I was going to tell you that I voted when American cities exploded in racial strife and the ghettos seethed with resentment over the the enduring chains of Jim Crow segregation.
But this is the most important election in my lifetime.
I was going to tell you that I voted in the Reagan years, when we trained murderous thugs and overthrew elected governments south of our border so we could “save” their people from communism.
Want to know what that hapless caravan making its way through Mexico is fleeing? Not communism, but the inevitable fallout from years of U.S.-funded instability.
But this is the most important election in my lifetime.
I voted when we reacted to the deadly attacks of 9-11 by invading a country that had nothing to do with any of it. We went. We’re are still there. We don’t know how to get out.
Mission Accomplished.
But this is the most important election of my lifetime.
This is the most important election because America is teetering on the abyss. Over the edge is darkness, and once we tumble we may never claw our way back.
We seem more divided white against black as ever Jim Crow intended. We are being fed a steady diet of hate and resentment and fear of The Other.
We cannot pick up a paper or turn on the television without learning of yet another mass shooting. We are not safe in our schools, the public square or our places of worship because gun possession is held to be sacred above all other American values.
I was going to tell you that this is the most important election of my lifetime for just one reason.
There is a callous, calculating hate monger in the White House. And every day he finds new ways to divide us one against another. He ridicules and derides and debases. And he delights in inciting the mob that aches to blame someone else, anyone, for their problems.
All to stroke his monumental ego.
He is bankrupting America. He scorns nations that have been allies for generations.
He has a captive Congress whose leaders are without principle or scruples and who will not stop, or even moderate, his excesses.
He is the leader of a party that holds power by gerrymandering, voter suppression and by cynically employing the propaganda tools of fear, bigotry and hate.
He is not on the ballot. But those who empower him are. They are guilty of dereliction of duty and must be turned out.
I was going to tell you that this is the most important election of my lifetime because two more years of Trump unleashed will likely be our undoing.
That our very democracy hangs in the balance.
I was going to tell you all of that.
But do I really have to?
Don’t you already know it?
Ron Cunningham is former editorial page editor of The Sun.
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