This week, it dawned on us that we crossed a major milestone. Since our youngest graduated from college, we are officially done with back-to-school. No more beginning of the school year cookouts. No more back-to-school shopping. No more curriculum nights and teacher conferences. And no more moving kids into and out of dorms and college apartments. Which is sad, in a way, but also a pretty major accomplishment.
On the upside, we still have booze left over from our daughter’s college graduation party, but we’re not exactly mixologists over here. Which leads us to a digression about Jon Taffer and “Bar Rescue” and how great it would be if we had someone talk to our politicians the way he talks to failing bar owners. Kind of like the Key & Peele bit about Barack Obama’s anger translator, only in reverse: America needs an anger translator to confront … certain political actors who shall remain nameless.
And that leads to an discussion that should probably have taken place on our imaginary political podcast: We talk about how to spend election night without watching television or following election returns, how political polls work in modern times when very few people have landlines, and how polls fail to measure the truly irrational reasons why people make political choices. It’s not always about the economy and foreign policy. Sometimes it’s about who’s taller, how a candidate looks, or who the candidate hates.
If that’s not enough stress for you, we then turn to climate change and how it’s affecting the weather this summer, with record high temperatures in some parts of the country and crazy, end-times-y storms here in the Chicago area. Which, in turn, leads to a discussion about how we’ve politicized things that are fundamentally not political. Like, you know, science. Climate change, global pandemics and other assorted public health crises exist regardless of your or our politics, and they require nonpolitical, nonpartisan solutions. Especially because things like climate change are not going to stop without taking action and things like COVID may fade away for now, but we know another major pandemic will come along eventually. But if we politicize everything, we’ll never come up with real solutions.
Case in point: After the 1918 flu, we had a hundred years to come up with nonpartisan ways to protect ourselves from airborne viruses, but we were still essentially blind-sided by COVID. And then COVID became completely politicized (mostly by people who didn’t want the government to tell them to wear masks and cut back on going out). So, it’s unlikely that we will ever have an adult conversation about what we got right and what we got wrong. Which means we’ll never develop workable, nonpartisan plans to deal with the next one. So that’s cool.
Anyway, we hope you enjoy the show, and please feel free to follow us on Instagram (@jenn_and_dave). You can also follow us on the site formerly known as Twitter, where our joint account is @JennandDave1 and the podcast account is @itsotetPodcast. Until next time!
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