From the moment she stepped on stage at the presidential debate held at Constitution Hall in Philadelphia, PA on September 10, 2024, Kamala Harris dominated, striding purposefully across the platform to force Donald Trump to shake hands with her as an equal. Trump had been evading that moment (as indeed, he avoided even glancing her way throughout most of the debate), but she walked directly into his space and demanded compliance with the time-honored norm.
Sometime during the night of September 4-5, 2024, I lost an old friend, who had been with me most of my life. I refer not to a being of flesh and blood, but one of leaf and bark: one half of a two-trunk birch clump in my front yard came crashing down, which had been on the property since the early ‘60s. Although the trees had been failing since I took over the property in 2019, with large upper branches dying off and rotting out, to fall onto the lawn, I had no idea how truly weak the tree was. No heavy ice storm or blowing hurricane winds heralded its end – my birch simply gave up.
Ah, back to school! I remember it well – the bookbags and lunchpails that had to conform to what was currently “cool” to avoid merciless taunting; catching up with what friends did over the summer break; the new pens, pencils, notepads and markers; readjusting to subpar school cuisine; the new clothes that were another potential pitfall of derision; and of course, the mass shootings.
No, wait – that one’s new. Well, new-ish; it’s been a quarter century since Columbine inaugurated a whole new rite-of-passage for American schoolchildren, replacing dodgeball with dodgebullet, and each year since, it seems we just keep upping the ante.
Perhaps no US election has been more fraught with consequences for the nation and the world than will be the 2024 presidential contest. It’s true that 2020’s election was pivotal as well, but the depths to which Donald Trump was willing to sink to maintain power weren’t apparent until he sent an armed mob to the Capitol to challenge those results, two months later. Now, with full knowledge of his depravity, abuse of power, and contempt for the Constitution, reinstalling this felon in the Oval Office is unthinkable. And yet, here we are.
On August 3rd, 2024, aspiring Olympian Anthony Ammirati coined a whole new meaning for the term “cockblocked” after failing to qualify for a pole vault event when his penis collided with the bar on the way down, knocking it to the ground (the bar, not his penis). The embarrassing footage of the phallic fail immediately went viral, and though Olympic authorities later confirmed that Ammirati would have been disqualified regardless, as other, less intimate portions of his anatomy had touched the bar prior to its dickish dislodgment, there was no stopping the cock-a-hoop hilarity that ensued. The French athlete, with no apparent irony, later described the incident as “a big disappointment.” Cheer up, Anthony – a manly manhood has its compensations!
When Kamala Harris announced her run for president in 2019, she looked like a long shot. And she was, with a troubled campaign that ended before the first primary votes were cast. But looking at her birth chart then, it seemed to me that she was going to get to the Oval Office at some point, however distant. When Joe Biden chose her as his running mate a year later, she took a major step towards that goal, and when they won that November, a giant leap was made.
But there were still a number of hurdles to cross in the race to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, such as waiting her turn after a successful re-elect gave Biden a second term (should that even occur), and then fending off Democratic competition for the open seat in 2028, and winning that election. US Vice Presidents don’t have a compelling track record of succeeding to the office, barring the death of the boss mid-term, and she still faced a strong headwind.
