Common Decency

When I lived in Narberth, Pa., I was running one day and tripped over some uneven pavement and fell face forward, my nose ending up maybe an inch from the cement. A woman who had been driving past stopped her car, got out, and came over to ask me if I was all right.

“Sure,” I said. “No problem. But thanks.”

Then I stood up and my legs were all shaky at my close call. “Maybe you could give me a ride home, after all,” I said. She did.

Another time I was riding my bike on the Wildwood Boardwalk and made a totally stupid turn without looking and crashed into a big eight-person tandem bike. No sooner had I hit the boards than the big bike stopped and its riders jumped out to help me. At the same time, the people at a pizza place who had seen my crash were there immediately with water, paper towels, and bandages. 

I know deep down that there is still this unbroken thread of common decency in America. I know just as deeply that there is none in the White House.

Once at Mar A Lago, an older man fell, hit his head, and lay bleeding on the lobby floor. Donald Trump laughed out loud and then bitched that there was blood on his great marble floor. That is his decency.

There is not a shred of common decency in the whole Trump regime. His White House whelps could care less if 100,000 Americans are infected with Covid 19 every day – which is on the horizon – through their father's murderous negligence, and his staff of pathetic enablers prance and mince endlessly to keep their master on his very thin rails of sanity. Decency has no place here – none – among these totally immoral critters of darkness and deceit. 

I know two people who have had personal connections to Joe Biden and among the first things they told me of their interactions with him are that he is a thoroughly decent man. Joe Biden has suffered the kind of personal loss and sorrow that has rendered him a decent and empathetic man and politician. If ever this country needed such a leader, it is now, in these ugly times of hate and fear, stoked daily by a so-called president whose idea of leadership is to huckster Goya beans from the oval office.

Biden's wife, Jill, who holds a doctorate of education degree, is from Hammonton in South Jersey, I am proud to say, the same town where Trump harridan Kellyanne Conway claims to have spent eight summers picking blueberries. Compare Jill Biden's life of public and community service to the thoroughly courtesan life of Melania Trump, the squint-eyed queen of the pre-nups. Jill Biden shows more decency in an average morning than Melania Trump does in a month of Sundays, her care and feeding of Barron to the contrary.

Americans still recognize and react to common decency, as the polls are showing day after day. They see in Joe Biden a 77-year-old man who could well be this country's last and best hope of rescue from a thoroughly indecent regime that has made America pitiable to the rest of the decent world. 

On November 3, America must again become a country of common decency. Or we will be consigned to the dustbin if history.