Podcast Commentary: He's Chemotherapy
By Shannyn Moore, The Raw Story Podcast
“Donald Trump is political chemotherapy.” -- Mark Cuban October 28, 2020 Raw Story Podcast
Many Americans are all too familiar with chemotherapy. Mr. Cuban’s statement isn’t rhetoric. It is evocative. I have heard the word cancer and none of the words that followed it. I have listened to my mother cry while her hair fell out in her hands through a bathroom door. I’ve watched a nurse in hazmat gear mix clear liquids that turned blood red, then put them through a heart port. Today, right after voting I bumped into a friend who doesn’t have her eyelashes or brows. She wears a warm hat that I’m sure someone who loves her knitted while praying her chemotherapy works.
There is something that happens at chemo centers all over the world. Often, at the end of chemo or radiation treatments a patient rings a bell. For cancer patients it signifies they have survived thus far. The clang peals through for others suffering that they’ve made a goal. It’s to serve as encouragement as well as a declaration.
For several decades, America has suffered tumorous afflictions. Economic disparity, racial injustice, unfounded wars, environmental catastrophes and devastating debt have been diagnosed, but not treated. We’ve become a society sick with the fatigue, putting make-up or bandages on open wounds infected by those with power addictions. Those symptoms made us ready for the kind of drastic poison prescribed in the 2016 election.
“Donald Trump is political chemotherapy.”
The next several minutes, Mr. Cuban spoke and I couldn’t hear him. I thought of cleaning up the radioactive vomit induced by chemo. Thought about wig shopping for my mother. About mouth blisters caused by the “cure”.
Chemotherapy kills lots of the good systems while killing the bad. Chemotherapy either kills you or makes you commit to life - while you scrape and claw your way back to the little things you hold dear. Moments that make up your life, like the smell of coffee, getting the washed laundry into the dryer, holding your loved ones, walking on the beach, burning toast and not crying about it.
“Donald Trump is political chemotherapy.”
His presidency has been painful. The collective fatigue of constant twitter vomit and toxic insults to our systems of normality have become constant. Our judicial process and standing in the world, things we once held as normal as walking, have been kneecapped.
We’ve had four years of chemo. It’s time to ring the bell and elect a doctor of democracy, one staffed with a Senate and House of nurses and aids. When people say, “Healthcare is on the ballot,” they are right. Not just our own personal access to doctors, but for the America who has become quite sick. It’s time to wake up and feel our hair starting to grow again, to find our balance returning, to walk without losing our breath from the audacity of lunitics, and to get back to the smell of coffee and burnt toast.
The Raw Story Podcast is a production of Raw Story Media and is editorially independent from RawStory.com. Listen to us at rawstorypodcast.com