There is a lot of ugliness in America. I’ll admit that I have personally seen and been the victim of some terrible, horrible, no-good-very-bad ugliness, and watched people close to me basically consent to it. Trump is a symptom of the illnesses of America, not the cause. Biden is closer to the people who caused our illnesses. So we have a choice between the symptom or the cause. If this were a disease, I’d say inflicting more of the cause, just to alleviate symptoms for a short while, is the opposite of a cure. In the case where democracy is close to death; should we choose the symptoms over the cause? Well, the election isn’t a disease, and I don’t know what the cure is. What about culling people and hating based on whether you vote/speak for the symptom, or the cause? Is that behavior of someone who is ill? Bernie expected a surge of young voters to carry him through the primary, but as Chomsky mentions, young people don’t believe voting does anything (except rob them of energy and brain cells). And weren’t they disenfranchised in the last primary when Bernie was winning? As proved by the journalism wikileaks did? Its a perfectly reasonable thing for a young person to think voting is worse than useless. Are we going to hate them for it? What happens after Biden wins? More, potentially worse symptoms than Trump? There is no bottom to the scum that can be dredged up to the top office if we pick the cause over the symptom. I ask these questions to show that the decisions Americans face in this election, and in general, are not black and white. Even if we do decide on one person to vote on, it is a necessity to taste the bitter nuances of such a decision.

When I was doing my dissertation proposal defense my teachers were trying to tease out what makes me tick; what I am working for, and for what purpose. They eventually figured out, and I with them, that what I was really after was freedom of thought for students, and in general. I was not interested in breaking or debunking mathematical structures for no reason. I am specifically interested in improving the quality of discussion by allowing patterns of thought other than mathematical. So much that was not mathematical has become mathematical. Probability was opposed to mathematics by Aristotle and for millennia in the West. Now probability is considered a part of mathematics, and with it “social sciences” now have a shiny veneer of mathematical structures governing what gets published and what research is “significant”. Even poetry, as Borges comments, is better if it is filled with “fire and algebra.” Mathematizing things has the effect of making people feel they really know something is good or bad.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a decision that was either pure good or depraved evil? If Trump were the devil, or the savior, we could all go to heaven with a simple, if inconvenient, political act of voting. Trump wont end the world; he could have already started a war. Will Biden keep us from war? Trump is a dumb brute that has served his purpose of scaring us into voting Hillary’s camp back in. Is that what it is to vote? Is voting an untrammeled good, even under the bullying we’re experiencing? Will Biden be finished punishing us when he wins, or will his camp still be vengeful?

Biden’s victory is not a victory. We voted Trump in to vote Biden’s camp out, then we bled for that decision. There will be much more pain too keep Biden in line, more than there was while Trump was president. The working class know that, and the backlash from Biden will be worse than Trump if we do not take those pains. This election shows that we have not given up the fight for the soul of America, that is all.