I just came from the first 2024 Joe Biden-Donald Trump presidential debates, and there were a few things that were clear. Most of them are irrelevant to this post.
But there is one thing that we, America, as a nation saw demonstrated before our eyes by Joe Biden.
And that is what is and is not weakened in the mind of an old person who is not yet senile.
We saw Joe Biden make a fair number of slips of the tongue and the memory.
But a President will not f up the country by a slip of the tongue.
We also saw that Joe Biden had not lost his higher thought processes one bit.
The slips of the tongue and the memory did not throw him off.
He could not rely on prepared answers, because this is a debate and you do not know what the other guy is going to say.
And at this point I would like to put aside any and all D vs. R conflict, and instead point out what we can learn about putting old people in positions of responsability.
Look, we don't have to fear the President dying of old age. Or getting visibly and obviously senile.
We will have a perfectly capable Vice President for those situations.
Besides which, we have lost young Presidents too.
But we can see now that an older person will show little slips of the tongue and the memory long before the higher thought processes slow down.
Our country will not be lost because the President accidentally says 30 thousand jobs before Congress instead of 30 million.
God hope those will be jobs gained.
It is the higher thought processes that are important.
And Joe Biden just demonstrated before the whole nation live on television that an old person will show slips of the tongue and of the memory long before they start to lose the higher thought processes.
And those thought processes will have that many more years of experience and knowledge behind them.
So many of the older and wiser civilizations revere the elderly.
Would prefer to have an 82-year-old as President in an age where modern medicine means more and more people are living into their 90's.
We get to go back over those debates in our mind and think, what have we learned as a civilization about the elderly?
Why do we perhaps know now that we can trust them to lead us?
That they will have slips of the tongue long before the higher thought processes grow weak.
Vote for whoever you want. Think it over, and make your own decision.
This is not about the election.
This is reflecting about learning about the strengths and weaknesses of the elderly, and why they are a treasure to make us strong, if we only let them.
Never stop learning, we will go places!
And the elderly will be helping to guide us, as the young learn so many new things!
God loves you!
Sincerely,
David S. Annderson
P.S. I'm sorry, I don't want to be political on this page. I just want to point out that the reason Biden had the slips of the tongue and the memory was that he was thinking hard, he was trying to keep all the facts straight, to figure out how to best present them, to figure out things like how to look good in front of the public while doing it, while presenting his policy thoroughly. Trump did not have the slips of the tongue simply because he was not thinking hard, he was just making stuff up at random and playing to his core, which he is very good at and knows how to do very well. I don't mean to get political. I am simply pointing out that it is the person that is thinking hard that has those slips of the tongue. Keeping all those thoughts straight and trying to figure out how to look good in front of the public is really hard for someone like Joe Biden who is more of a planner than an improviser. That too contributes to slips of the tongue- thinking hard outside your comfort zone. Like, for example, perhaps me in conversation with a group of strangers on television, rather than writing my story in private, getting it right before releasing it. That would be way outside of my comfort zone, and if I did that 35 or 40 years from now, when I'm more Joe Biden's age (Iam 45 as I write this), perhaps you would see a fair few slips of the tongue there as well!