Oppose Harm in the Voting Booth

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This final tenet of Distilled Harmony has a vital place in the voting booth.  Oppose Harm is the last of the four tenets because in some ways it is a tacit admission that the first three were unsuccessful. We need to remember that the primary objective of Distilled Harmony as a belief system is to enable and encourage a kinder and more gentle world. It calls upon us first to foster harmony, then to enable beauty, next clarify our understanding of the world via studying and reducing the needless or deceptive “smoke and mirrors” of political and social agendas. 

Sometimes that is not enough. Sometimes in politics we find ourselves confronted with candidates who simply do not believe in a kinder and more gentle world, or even worse, believe that such a world should be the sole province of those who are members of the candidate’s specific demographic categories: ethnicity, religion, socio-economic status, political party, etc.  These are the “my way or the highway” candidates who may pretend to want to “reach across the aisle” to advance a shared view for America but in reality believe that there is only one proper view of America and it is their special property. They are bullies.

In the history of American politics there are plenty of examples of bullies in all political parties. Some parties and religious organizations, mostly no longer with us to any meaningful degree, were actually founded to advance the agenda of one gang of bullies or another, like Charles Coughlin and his radical quasi-Catholic National Shrine of the Little Flowers, a vocal Canadian/American front for Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers Party [Nazis] which swept into power in Germany in the middle third of the 1900s. Hitler’s Nazis, while not a unique instance, are perhaps the most visible example here in the West of what can happen when a “bully-centered” party is able to capture a country’s significant political and military power.

For those of us who hold Distilled Harmony as an important and viable belief system, the 2020 presidential election is a complex decision, but not for the usual reasons. While ballotpedia [ballotpedia.org] reports that 107 Republicans have filed to run for president, the site admits that there are a lot of pseudonyms and “fake candidates” on that list. And despite former Governor Weld of Massachusetts having thrown his hat into the Republican ring, no one seriously considers any serious challenge to Trump. For those of us who believe in the four tenets of Distilled Harmony, or values closely allied to those tenets, President Trump has removed himself from consideration. He ran unabashedly as a racist bully, and his administration has created a dark “Bully Pulpit” unlike anything Teddy Roosevelt could have imagined. Demanding absolute personal loyalty and pulling “truth” from the most malevolent corners of the Internet, he provides a textbook example for everything Distilled Harmony opposes.

Still, the Democrats are’t making it easy. As I write this, there are 271 Democrats who have filed with the Federal Election Committee as presidential candidates. Among those 271 are 25 or 30 who appear to be serious possibilities. While it is true that all of the serious candidates fall closer to the ideals and tenets of Distilled Harmony than our current President, they are by no means a cluster of Stepford Candidates, clones cut from the same cloth. They all do hope that folks who voted for Trump last time around are suffering from some degree of voter's remorse - “I didn’t think he was actually that much of a racist bully.” But there real differences among these serious democratic candidates, and I appear to be on all their mailing lists. While I do have some early favorites, I am nowhere near a final choice. I have a lot more reading to do - comparing policy statements and proposals and researching past behaviors as they relate to the four tenets of Distilled Harmony. Hopefully my eventual favorite will survive the primaries relatively unscathed and come Election Day I will be able to fill in the little circle next to the name of a genuinely harmonious candidate.  

Well, that is it for my “Voter’s Guide According to Distilled Harmony.” I hope you found it helpful. I will now return my attention to painting and poetry, both of which are more in harmony with sleeping well and lowering my blood pressure. By the way, did you know that almost all of Bob Ross’s paintings live in a small warehouse in Northern Virginia? And no, you can’t buy one. You are supposed to paint your own. :-)

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