Harris for President
July 27, 2024
by William P. Meyers

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But that is not enough to stop the Slow Motion Apocalypse

I have known about Kamala Harris for a lot longer than most Americans. Partly that is because I tend to follow politics more, partly it is due to the circumstances of my life. I don't just think we should elect her president. I think we should have elected her in 2020. At the same time, I don't agree with her on all issues. Also, just electing her is not enough. We are in an environmental emergency, in a Slow Motion Apocalypse, and there will be much resistance in America and elsewhere to doing what really needs to be done.

Vice President Harris was born in Oakland, California in 1964. In 1965 the rights of non-white Americans were finally recognized, nationally, by Congress. Little Kamala had both a mother and a father with PhD's, so in some ways she had advantages over most American children. So it should not be a surprise that she did okay in school, went to college, then got a law degree in 1989. Not from a fancy place like Yale or Harvard, but from UC Hastings in San Francisco.

My memory is there were not that many black females with law degrees back then. To the extent they existed, my impression is that they wanted to make money (fair enough) or to work as public defenders or civil rights attorneys. Harris took a different path. She accepted a position as a deputy DA in Alameda County (basically Oakland). That made her a prosecutor. An adversary of criminals. A position often associated, at least back then, with a stain of racism. But if all prosecutors are white, does that not make prosecution slant to racism? I think it was important that Harris and other black prosecutors brought balance to that wing of our legal system.

I lived in Emeryville, a tiny jurisdiction tucked between Berkeley and Oakland, back around 1979. My neighbors were mostly black and my house mates (I rented a room slightly bigger than a closet) were not college graduates. Two were former prostitutes. I was disillusioned by politics, so despite having a degree in Political Science, I was hanging with the remains of the 1960s counterculture. So I know Alameda County a bit, and I know how difficult it would have been for Kamala to work as a prosecutor there.

Yet she persisted, becoming an assistant DA in San Francisco in 1998. I had lived in San Francisco from about 1990 to 1993, so I knew that scene, especially its radical politics (I worked for a while for the Industrial Workers of the World, keeping the books). I had moved up the coast to Mendocino County. My main political connection was Earth First! But I still followed San Francisco politics a bit. So I heard when Harris surprised everyone by winning the election for San Francisco District Attorney in 2004. By then I was on a school board in Mendocino County, was active in the (then still growing) Green Party, and paying much more attention to conventional politics. I thought it was great a black woman had won an important election in San Francisco.

Later, when I heard about Harris, it was griping from the far left. She prosecuted people! Sometimes black men. Who had raped black women, shot other black men, shot police men, etc. They did not see her as protecting good black people. They saw her as a racist cog in a racist system. Did I say I am white? Blue eyed? But I like honest, competent black politicians. I supported Cynthia McKinney for President in 2008, when I still had hopes for the Green Party. I was glad when our first black President was elected, but he was too centrist for my tastes. He did little about the impending environmental crisis, for instance.

In 2010 Ms. Harris was elected Attorney General of California. Again, the leftists continued to hate her. She did lots of good things, like successfully suing banks who ripped people off during the housing crisis of 2008. She took on the California computer oligarchy to force them to inform users of their privacy (usually non-privacy) policies. But she did not usher in the socialist revolution, so the left still hated her. I did not meet her, but I met a variety of people who knew her work in San Francisco or at the state level, and they all spoke highly of her. In 2016 she won a seat in the U.S. Senate, becoming the first black woman Senator from California.

By the time Harris entered the 2020 presidential primary I was living in Seattle, and had given up the Green Party for the Democratic Party, which, locally, was about the same on issues as the Greens. So I knew pretty many Democrats including local party leaders. No one I talked to had heard of Harris, at first, except Bob Ferguson, Washington State's Attorney General (who I am supporting for Governor). I volunteered for her campaign, but she dropped out well before our state primary. I think before any primary. Which was okay. Cutting losses is a good long-term strategy to many aspects of life.

Unless you have been hiding somewhere with no internet access, you know that she then became Joe Biden's Vice President. Now she is running for President against an incompetent, befuddled racist felon.

Kamala Harris is smart. Smart is good unless someone is using their smarts to hurt other people. She has a ton of experience in the law, seeing it work at the ground level, and supervising it at high levels. She seems to have a balanced personality. She likes a crowd, she likes people, but she displays empathy, whereas her opponent displays narcissism. She can lead people in a good direction, even when a lot of people are dazed and confused.

So vote for her for President. Send her campaign a few dollars. Maybe volunteer.

Then again, far too many Americans believe the lies fed to them by Chevron and Exxon through the Vances and Trumps of the American political system and the Fox News types. People need to understand that we really are in an environmental emergency. Human behavior needs to change, and change quickly, or more and more people will be experiencing the increasingly visible hand of the Slow Motion Apocalypse. We need environmentalist majorities in both houses of Congress. We need to oust the brain-dead idiots who were appointed to the Supreme Court. We need to oust the insane state governments from DeSantis in Florida to the Jesus brayers of Oklahoma. We need Americans to understand that cheap gasoline has poisoned their minds, our system, and the environment.

Hurricanes, droughts, derechos, and wild fires are doing the U.S. more harm than Pearl Harbor ever did. We need to declare a state akin to war, where people are willing to make sacrifices. Rich people especially. And we need to coordinate with the rest of the world. We need strict prosecution of those who have committed crimes against the earth. Hopefully, Ms. Harris will push us in that direction. But given the selfishness of American voters and the difficulty of getting Congress to pass laws, electing Kamala Harris will likely not be sufficient.