Enough Already!

​That’s one of my favorite Jewish sayings! Given our people’s two-thousand-year existence in diaspora, one can understand our desire to find a safe port and a good home. The Holocaust didn’t help, nor did two millennia of antisemitic words and practices in other people’s countries. As Ken Burns’s recent video documentary on America and the Holocaust made clear, mid-twentieth-century antisemitism in this country kept hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from coming to America and, mostly likely, helped consign them to Hitler’s gas chambers. Modern Israel gives us back our ancestral homeland, but it may be too little too late...

Well, on a less epic scale, I am once again sick and tired of the electioneering and nonstop fundraising that characterizes the six months or more prior to national elections. In this regard, both parties are equally obnoxious in their constant blaming and shaming to raise funds. Blatant exaggeration runs rampant: “Disaster in Arizona!,” Liz Chaney Just Eviscerated Trump!,” “Georgia Is Doomed!,” and so on. The unstated follow-up to these headlines—at least the negative ones—is “And it's all your fault!” In this time of rising inflation, 200 hundred or more campaign emails a day force their way into America’s electronic inboxes as if every American were a walking private foundation with no other financial obligations than to fund every candidate of their party throughout the country. It’s a joke and not a good one! I for one believe that all our elections should be publicly funded, with each final candidate given the same modest amount to do their best with. At least this kind of level financial playing field would clearly show which candidate in each election—local, state, or national—had the ability to create the best, most compelling campaign from the same set amount of money as their challenger had.

​Of course, nothing is perfect, whether good or bad. So occasionally there will be some clever campaign advertising that causes a smile or even a laugh. A friend who is campaigning for our incumbent attorney general here in Colorado asked us to place his campaign sign in our front yard. We happened to like this candidate and were planning to vote for him. As a punster and someone who writes blogs and books about everyday wisdom, I enjoyed the wittiness of his brief tagline, based on the fact that his last name means “wise one” in German, with the English cognate easy to find. You can see my photo of his sign below. But this contrary example notwithstanding and with just two-and-a-half weeks to Election Day, I’m prepared to join my ancestors in saying, I’m done with all this egocentric nonsense. Enough already!!!