What Do We Need? (A Question Asked Mid-Toke)

So much to think about. My brain hurts.

What does this wonderful country need in a President? What do I need in a President? Are those even two different questions? Can they be the same thing?

I’ll be honest, I’m out back, enjoying something local again. Enquiring minds need to know.

So what do we actually need? Big question, if I do say so myself. And I’m here to tell you, yes, why me? Because apparently I’m the only one asking. Just me and my doobie.

Well , I’m in Oregon. What’s that? You’re in North Carolina? Well, fudge. That plan just went right out the window. What’s best for me may not be what’s best for you. Maybe that’s exactly why we have state governments. Could be. What do you think? Is that why we’re called a Republic in the first place? Fancy that.

Now, a quick detour into Trump bashing. How much money and energy has that fool spent trying to punish blue states simply because they didn’t vote for him? What a waste of presidential energy. But what do you expect from Second String Donny? Okay. Trump bashing over. Doobie’s out.

Let’s make this even more confusing.

I live in a suburb close to wine country and farmland, but also close to the big metro. Almost all of Oregon is fishing, timber, hunting, or farming, yet nearly every political decision in this state gets made by the blue, because the population centers are Portland, Eugene, Salem, and Corvallis. College towns, every one of them. So the majority of the money and the decision-making gets structured around housing, homelessness, drugs, and freeways, while the rest of the state quietly picks up the bill.

Doesn’t sound very fair, does it?

Now zoom that out to the national scale and you start to understand a real piece of the division we’re living through. Too many decisions get built around the needs of the masses in the cities, while rural communities pick up the tab, if not in coin, then in grain.

I’ve oversimplified the problem here, deliberately, just to make the point land. But I think the point landed anyway.

So let’s simplify the original question. Who, or what, do we actually want for our next President, other than a golf hack with an ego problem and an image obsession?

I’ll be looking for someone who genuinely recognizes diversity and understands that micromanagement from Washington is a fool’s errand they have no business attempting. I’ll be looking for candidates who understand that the answer for New York isn’t the answer for Phoenix, and who are willing to let each region work out its own problems, asking for federal help only when it’s actually needed. I’ll be looking for candidates who believe in a strong military as a deterrent, not a submissive club to be quietly dismantled or weaponized for personal grievance.

This is a post that’s going to take on many forms in the months ahead. All I really want to accomplish today is getting you to start asking the same question I’m asking, what do you think we actually need, and to stop listening to the BS in the meantime.

Okay by you?