What’s nuttier? The 2016 American presidential election, or my folks’ current situation?

Last updated on: February 24, 2016 at 11:29 am by Jane the Actuary

What’s nuttier? The 2016 American presidential election, or my folks’ current situation? 2016-02-24T11:29:51-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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And by “nutty,” I mean unsustainable, worrisome, a train wreck waiting to happen.

In the end, I suppose, having aging parents is like training, for the next life stage of having young adult children. Not so much in terms of how to manage their infirmaties — that’s yet to come, for the most part — but the need to suck it up and accept that they’ll make their own decisions, as wrong as you think they are.

What’s the latest? Well, since Dad’s fall two years ago, he has never been authorized to resume driving by his doctor. The explanation had always been that he doesn’t have sufficient reaction time any longer, and, so far as I know, the doctor had never particularly held out any hope that this was temporary, either. So his car had sat in the driveway, with Dad periodically complaining about the doctor refusing to authorize driving, but never doing anything about it — until yesterday. That is, two weeks ago, they’d received a notification from the city that they had a non-running car in the driveway that they had to deal with, by getting it operational or moving it into the garage (it had been sitting in the driveway with a flat tire and the hood open for who-knows-how-long), so over the weekend, my nephew came over and pumped the tire and charged the battery. And then yesterday, unbeknownst to Mom, Dad got in the car and went on a drive. Just a couple miles’ worth, and he returned safe and sound, but cr@!, what next?

And in the meantime, well, I’d been trying my best to encourage Mom to check out the fitness center at the community center where they have their Senior Lunch. “You say that when you get home from lunch or from running an errand afterwards, you’re tired, but if you start exercising regularly, that can actually help you feel less tired and help you have more energy.” “Even if you just spend 5 minutes on a treadmill, it’ll help.” That sort of thing. But it’s a bust — or, rather, I’ve learned that what I think of as “encouragement” she thinks of (or is close to thinking of) as nagging, so is counter-productive.

Now, it’s still the case that I think that their quality of life would be significantly improved if they would get out and be more active, by participating in more of the senior activities at the community center, for instance. And it’s not just a matter of what they’re happy with now, but what would help them preserve their independence in the long term. But I can’t make them do it. So maybe they’ll just muddle along as they are for some time yet, with no real harm done, or maybe they won’t, with a potential outcome worse than if they’d made changes earlier, but there’s very little I can do about it.

And, after I’d talked to Mom yesterday, I then turned on the news, and opened up my usual internet news sources (twitter, RCP, etc.).

Let’s face it, Trump has a clear path to the nomination, with the combination of winning the winner-take-all states and gaining substantial pluralities elsewhere, unless the Republican field empties very quickly. But Kasich stays in. (Why?) And Carson stays in — claiming that “as soon as people start discussing the issues, they’ll begin to support him.” Even if they were to drop out, even if it were left to Trump, Cruz, and Rubio, that’s not enough for one of Cruz or Rubio to begin winning, rather than taking second and treating that as a victory. But right now, each of Cruz and Rubio are saying that they agree in principle with the idea that it has to be a two-man race, but simply insist that it has to be the other candidate that does so.

What’s going on? How is a bombast like Trump getting so much support? Is it because of his support of The Wall? Yes and no — so far as I can tell, the typical Trump supporter sees this as an indicator that he’s “on their side” and that everyone else isn’t because they support open immigration as a cheap labor source. The Republican party is fracturing before our very eyes, with Trump supporters (and even Cruz supporters) seeing The Establishment as a nefarious entity, even if they can’t identify a specific misdeed. If this were Germany, they’d have formed a new party by now, similar to what happened in Germany with the Euro-skeptic Alternative fur Deutschland.

How much of this is about immigration at all? I don’t know. Supposedly, polls tell us that immigration (both the overall number of new arrivals and the question of a legalization program) isn’t a big issue for the electorate, but it certainly seems to stand in for a whole set of issues: trustworthiness, support for American workers, etc. “I’ll build a wall” is fundamentally about communicating, “I’ll do whatever it takes to look out for the U.S., and my opponents won’t.” The Wall is a symbol of much more.

And, of course, things aren’t any better on the Democratic side. Between Clinton’s corruption and Sanders’ pie-in-the-sky socialism, I don’t know which is worse.

Which gets to my question for readers: is there anything any of us, individually, can do about this trainwreck?

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