“So, what happens if voters are forced to choose between two candidates they don’t want? A Wall Street Journal poll (conducted by pro-Trump super PAC pollster Tony Fabrizio) suggests the answer: It found that among voters who disapprove of both Trump and Biden, Biden leads Trump by a massive 39 points: 54 percent to 15 percent. Clearly, swing voters who dislike Biden dislike Trump even more.”

That quote from Mark A. Theissen’s opinion piece in this week’s Washington Post is a clear signal, but one that a majority of those now in charge of the Republican Party can be fully expected to ignore.

But while Trump’s chances to retake the presidency may be slim at this point, he is a solid favorite to reclaim the GOP’s presidential nomination as the “Bring Back the 1950s” rightwing juggernaut is making gains in a full court frontal assault on all levels of elected offices in the U.S. from proverbial dog catchers to state senators and judgeships. This points to the terrifying realization that, yes, “the enemy is at the gates” now, and in light of this, the biggest threat to our democracy and freedoms is public complacency.

The debate within the Democratic Party really should not center on Biden’s age. We need more oriental or Native American wisdom in our culture to establish that it is not the chronological age of human bodies that matter nearly as much as the values, insights and capacities for wise judgment seasoned in the human mind and soul that only improve with age.

Only if a thorough medical examination were to determine that a physical impairment has compromised a person’s ability to fully engage on those levels should a decision be made to disqualify someone. It is not a matter of a person’s ability to articulate, either, but only to soundly judge.

President Biden has never been the best at articulation, but that didn’t keep him from winning the presidency and to lead the nation through two years of the most spectacular progress in the face of great headwinds since at least LBJ and probably going back further to FDR. Who knows, before he’s done, he may leave even FDR in his wake.

And that, friends, depends not on what he does, but on what we do.

The incredible overreach of the current GOP, especially in terms of its unbelievably arrogant assault on the bodies of women and the livelihoods of the elderly and infirm, and its insistence on holding up a now indicted, thoroughly corrupt crook as its standard bearer, mean for the nation that while we face the most dangerous of times, at the same time we have our best opportunity to soundly and emphatically restore shared values rooted in the respect and virtue to which every human soul is entitled.

Fearful people quake under the pressure of these times, bleating their hope that everybody somehow “just get along.” They can’t see beyond their fears to have the clarity required of us, to appreciate that the enemies of freedom and democracy will not stop short of the most draconian of anti-human measures in an attempt to consolidate their power over us.

In fact, the next period may be the most consequential in the history of our nation, with one trajectory, if followed, leading to some of the most stunning scientific and technological breakthroughs imaginable that will confound this current generation of naysayers and bring a heretofore uncharted array of benefits to all humanity on this planet. At the heart of it will be the onset of the productive use of controlled nuclear fusion energy, such as some of our most visionary leaders in Congress are now pursuing.

On the other hand, with an alternative trajectory, our species on this planet will be doomed by those who have put hatred for humanity’s wide and amazing diversity of lives, thoughts and beliefs ahead of every rational impulse and would effectively drag us into hell.

The outcome of this set of choices is not predetermined, not on Earth nor on any of the billions of living spaces in our universe where surely the evolution of sentient life has emerged to face comparable options.