As the Jewish New Year 5781 commences, the final push for the White House, and thousands of other elected posts in America, has already commenced with over six states having already begun in-person early voting and the first Presidential debate only ten days away. While entirely too much space is still being allotted to fantasies and fabrications as to what the current US head of state might do if he loses, many real issues are starting to gel, and together with glaring differences between the representatives of the major parties, there is a  rising awareness of how much will need to be done in 2021 after the dust from this election settles.

Back in April before the insufficiency of our country’s response to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic was obvious to most Americans, Adam Tooze, in the London Review of Books (“Shockwave”, 16 April, 2020), noted that the US federal system and the EU multi-nation organization were both challenged at a level well beyond China and South Korea. As successful as the Western economic bloc was at managing  the rules of global finance and strategic power, they had serious problems in dealing with an invisible enemy that seemed to dictate a choice between lockdown or a staggering death count. The US especially, because of the absence of both a national system of unemployment insurance system and a national health care system, found that even with budgeting huge dollar amounts they could not get sustained traction. Now, six months later, with young people going back to school, notably to colleges away from home, and the end of the European tourist season with the fall flu season not far behind, the citizenry of the most developed economies in the world are nervous. The US Senate cannot come up with a deal for more money, fiscal stimulus is sorely needed, the European economies are moving more deeply into recession, and the US GDP is now smaller than our national debt for the first time since WWII. With climate change adding an emphatic punctuation to the current state of affairs, it’s safe to say that this is an election that will impact human communities all over the world. It is our challenge and our opportunity to move away from war and abuse and toward meeting the real needs of our people  and our planet.