In Each Other’s Way
When I was in high school, my grandmother was living in what we called at the time a nursing home. She had a bad hip and used a wheelchair to get around. One day after a visit, we went down the hall to the dining area…I walked, and she used her wheelchair. They advised me to let her wheel herself along to get used to it, instead of pushing her.
As we went along, another resident—also in a wheelchair—had just left her room and was sort of parked in the hallway. It would have taken nothing for my grandmother to simply veer a bit to the left and go around the other woman. Instead, my grandmother sort of got up a head of steam and rammed right into the other woman, moving her and her wheelchair to the side, and kept on going.
I suggested politely that that was not a very nice thing to do. My grandmother’s reply was simple: “she was in my way.”
I thought of that story late last night when news came that both Joe Biden and Donald Trump had clinched enough delegates to win their respective parties’ nomination for president.
Because the way each acts and refers to the other…it’s sort of like two seniors doing everything they can to ram each other’s wheelchair, because the other is in their way.
That’s really not good for public discourse and conversation about who should be the next leader of the free world…and certainly not good that we now have 237 days until election day…roughly 8 months of this constant sniping about which is the worse candidate, which would destroy democracy…as opposed to which has a forward-looking plan, which has fresh ideas for a unique time.
Instead, I’m afraid we’re just going to be ramming wheelchairs, because each is in the other’s way.
