~a column by Colleen O’Brien
“Scientific American,” the longest published magazine in America (August 28, 1845), for the first time in its 175 years has endorsed a presidential nominee.
Editors have endorsed Joseph R. Biden because they are so afraid of Donald J. Trump.
The evidence and the science show that Donald Trump has badly damaged the U.S. and its people—because he rejects evidence and science. The most devastating example is his dishonest and inept response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which cost more than 190,000 Americans their lives by the middle of September. [SCI AM Oct 2020]
The editors of the magazinefear for the people of this country because he, the President of this country, has for nine months and to this day continued to attack scientists with disdain and dismissiveness to the point that none of us are sure of what is safe to do, who to believe and what will protect us.
If you do not fall into this category of anxiety and are striding through your life without fear – and therefore without mask – to your Walmart off the freeway and your Dillard’s department store in the mall, into your bar, your friends’ wedding, your church, your political rally…and then returning to the rest of your life where you are in contact with older people leery of having to go out, essential workers in grocery stores, post offices and package liquor businesses, well, think about it: we are all touching a few someones who touch other someones we don’t know. To protect ourselves, we have to protect everyone else.
“Scientific American” has “come out” not just for a man but mainly against the other man. This is not merely a milestone in the brief march we have left until we vote on November 3; it is News – with a capital “N” and no “fake” in front of it.
Would that all Senators who have been so gutless as to back a con-man rather than the Constitution they swore an oath to;
would that:
- all ministers of whatever faith who have not spoken up;
- all women, African Americans, Latinx, Asian, Muslim, military he has dissed;
- all right-wing media greedy enough to line up to lie with him through four torturous years;
- all left-wing media who, until it was too late, eagerly wrote the headlines of his outrageousness without condemning his lies and slurs and racist, sexist, ageist comments;
- all voters who ate it up that he would yell out in public the “F-bomb”, the “sons-of…”, the wash-out-your-mouth bathroom words that he spewed with a smirk because he knew he would be rewarded with encouragement from his “base”…
…would that any of them had stepped up to the plate early days as “Scientific American” has, late days.
“Scientific American,” one of the few: It has come out with grave concern for the country in well-chosen, non-inciteful, factual words about a man who may in fact be just a front for the wealthy and the dictators of the world but who has accomplished in unnatural selfishness a great deal – in harming us, our country, our air, water, industry, jobs, health, respect for one another, disdain from the rest of the world – not to mention the harm he has done to the integrity of this Democracy itself.
We are not the country we were four years ago. We are not greater again, we are worse than we could have dreamt in any nightmare or made up in any dystopian novel. We are dying on the young vine we planted a mere 243 years ago, thinking that we, humans, had at last come up with a way to manage equality for all people that would stretch on and on into the far future. We’ve come close to losing it in four years.
Thank you, “SciAm.” I have a little hope because of your honesty that we won’t lose it all.
