Watching Town Hall Meetings

The Democratic candidates for President are a bunch of people running for Vice-President, at least so far.

They've all reached that place in their lives where money is the least interesting thing in the world to them. No longer do they have to believe in capitalism like they once did: at the most, capitalism is just another word to them like the word socialism, though the male candidates seem loathe to utter either word in the fear of being identified as either one or the other, as a capitalist or as a socialist.  

I was surprised last night, listening to two of the candidates speak, both of them women, that there wasn't one mention of the whale that washed up on the shore in the Phillippines with 88 pounds of plastic trash inside its body, including more than 40 pounds of plastic bags. The whale's coroner, Darrell Blatchely, called it the worse collection of plastic inside an animal he had ever seen. "The plastic in some areas was so compact it was almost beocming calcified, almost like a solid brick," Mr. Blatchely said. "It had been there for so long it had started to compact." This story would seem like the perfect platform from which to launch the capitalist defense of socialism, or the socialist response to capitalism, or both.

The whale story, as published in The New York Times this morning with the headline, "88 Pounds of Plastic Found Inside Dead Whale in Phillipines" (March 19, 2019) did not, however, indicate whether the whale was male or female. Weighing in at 1,100 pounds and measuring 15 feet long, I'm assuming it was a male whale.

How good it would be to at last elect a female President of the USA. I'm all for it. A female candidate won't be as hung-up over the words capitalism and socialism, won't be as afraid to talk about the differences between them as men are afraid. I do want to hear from at least one of the female Democratic candidates that she's really running for President and not Vice-President, just as I'd like the hear the same from one of the male Democratic candidates. Until I do I'm backing Bernie Sanders, unequivocally.