It’s that season.  Pots of mums and lawn signs.

I noted this to a friend the other day.  She threw up her hands, turned around, took a deep breath and let fly her consternation at the state of the union right now.

 “I’ve had lawn signs defaced, broken and removed,” she said.   “I tried to have a fair discussion with a friend about some of the issues that directly affect us and found that anything I said … and I was asking questions, was received with a decided annoyed air of “how could you be so stupid to even ask that question?”

“You would think that I had asked her how much she weighed.  I backed off.  We have been friends for years and her accusation led me to believe that the friendship would end if I continued.  So, coward that I am, I backed off.  But that scared me because her behavior was a lot like someone who had become a political zombie.  Of course, now I question why we are friends.”

This stuff is toxic. Both sides of the political spectrum have die-hard positions like this.  One accuses the other of being the children of Karl Marx, Bernie Sanders and movie stars who run child porn networks while the other sees their opposite as hood wearing, cross burning devotees of Vladimir Putin who fake being Christian and treat women like it was a 1950 TV show.

This is an important election.  Our nation is entangled, deeply divided, confused by so many disturbances.  Leadership on so many levels has failed to address the emerging issues. How to deal with civil discord? Is this a national or a local issue? The virus runs rampant even before flu season and while many are seemingly unaffected, 190,000 deaths is not something to forget.   Guidance is off and on, decidedly linked to politics. We are still not sure whether the response to COVID-19 is a national or local problem.  The economy is not booming back.  Yes, the stock market is, but job losses continue and people are running out of the wherewithal to pay for food and shelter.  Congress, which made bold moves earlier to support the economy is now gridlocked.  Those with a lot of capital, those who are the more “well off” are doing well, but the middle classes, lower income families, whole industries and businesses are not.

We are unsure about the efficacy or safety of awaited vaccines. Our children are back at school and, despite the herculean efforts of the schools, the children are under no particular guarantee of safety other than most will not become very sick from the virus … but they can carry the virus.  Contact with asymptomatic children can put their teachers, their parents and grandparents in harm’s way. Testing is now said to be limited only to those with symptoms, according to the CDC.  Why is that?  Didn’t we just learn that asymptomatic carriers can be super spreaders of COVID?  To say this is a mess would be to underestimate the severity of what is happening. How many of us will be afraid to be around our children and grandchildren after they go to school?  This is sad.

 Is it true that we have to deal with the virus before the economy can recover?  I am no economist.  I am also not an epidemiologist, but I look to them for guidance. But we hear different things from the government and from economists and epidemiologists. We hear conflicting reports.  Will there be a safe and effective vaccine before Election Day?  Should we attempt to return to a pre-COVID lifestyle and let herd immunity progress … at the cost of 2.5 million lives? That has been a suggestion from high places.  Yikes.

And how do you deal with the roiling dissatisfaction with the disparate way that minorities, particularly those whose ancestors are from the continent of Africa, have been treated not only by some in law enforcement but by a culture that is designed to keep them where “they belong?” Is this true?  Is this politics?  Both issues are being loudly shouted, some in the streets, others in the media.

And life?  Voting for life means voting how?  This is a significant issue.  Is one stage of life more important than others so that voting is blind to other issues of life? While people argue about whether Black Lives Matter should read All Lives Matter … consider the issue of the continuity of life.  Is this all a matter of nomenclature?

What is fake news?  Is it lying or is it news that doesn’t support your beliefs?  Is it both?  Riddle me that.

And then there is the voting thing.  Without mail-in voting, those who have no access to transportation to the polling place, those who can’t take off from work to vote, those who, in these COVID times, are afraid of going to a polling place, etc. or who are ill will not be unable to make their citizen voice heard through the ballot box.  Is voting by mail as easily corrupted as “some” say?  Absentee ballots or mail-in ballots are the same and tracked the same, but those  “some” say it is an opportunity to scam the system while others point to interference by foreign actors not only using the media to spread false information but also accessing the hardware and software that we use to vote.  Is this all a conspiracy to question the validity of the vote?

So … there are a lot of questions to be considered as you mull your choice.  This is true for both sides: What you choose, for whom you vote, will affect not only you but generations to come.  What values do you want to protect and written into law and who will work hard to protect and make policy that will allow those values to underpin our daily lives.

How did we get so divided?  The strength of our nation is encapsulated in our Constitution which provides the method for not only governing but also transitioning from one administration to another.  Trusting in the process, earnestly investigating the issues and solutions have today been boiled down to “middle school style” name calling, TV and social media ads and intransigence.  Politicians, religious leaders, media pundits – your neighbors – are digging their fox holes.

Yard signs, mums and fox holes are this Fall’s garden.