Low blows keep on coming

We’ve almost made it. In another 11 days we will have survived another election season, and hopefully our sanity will still be (mostly) intact. I know I say this every two years, but the campaigning this year seems to have reached a new low.

Maybe the hardest contest to stomach has been the race for governor between Roy Barnes and Nathan Deal. Over the last week or so the candidates have been hitting each other below the belt so often I have to believe they are both singing soprano by now.

You’ve probably seen the Barnes ad that claims that Deal sponsored a law in Georgia that, if it had passed, would have weakened protection of rape victims from being questioned about their personal lives when their accused attacker was on trial. While the accusations are being leveled in a voice over, you get visuals of an empty car that appears to have been the scene of a struggle.

I suppose the suggestion is that someone was raped in this car and then – what? I’m not sure. Perhaps the victim is supposed to have fled the scene after the attack so that Nathan Deal would not force her to testify about her personal life.

What the ad doesn’t tell you is that Deal and the other legislators who were behind the bill were trying to bring Georgia law into line with federal statutes so that rape convictions would be less likely to be thrown out on appeal. Some people believed that the changes would have weakened the state rape shield law (though opinions varied on this point) and it was eventually scrapped because of the negative publicity that followed.

What the ad also doesn’t tell you is that Roy Barnes was at that time a member of the State Bar Evidence Committee that reviewed and approved that proposed change to the law.

I am certain that the Barnes team who produced the attack ad know all these facts. They know that they are distorting the situation, and they know very well that Nathan Deal is not some monster who wants to persecute rape victims. They know this, but I’m sure if questioned they would say that this is just how the game is played. This is how you win. And everybody does it.

Sadly, that is the truth. And Deal’s people are playing the game as well. His campaign has an ad out now that digs up a very old and unflattering quote Barnes made in a debate years ago regarding the inevitability of losing some children who are in state custody. Barnes said immediately after that debate that he misspoke, and that he does not view the death of any child in state custody as being acceptable.

Of course he doesn’t, and no reasonable person would think that he would. But these ads aren’t aimed at the reasonable side of our brains. They are character assassinations based on the flimsiest of premises, and it amazes me that the people involved in producing them can live with themselves.

The really sad part is that because the game is played this way it obviously prevents a lot of good people from ever wanting to run for office. Would you want to subject yourself to a process where everything you’ve ever done or said in your life was put under a microscope and the most unflattering parts were yanked out, completely out of context, and broadcast out as a 30-second summary of your poor character?

I’m not sure how to fix this, but maybe a start would be to contact these candidates directly and let them know, in your own words, that what they ought to be ashamed of themselves. You can write to the Barnes campaign at info@roy2010.com and the Deal campaign at info@nathandeal.org.

Write and let them know how much you “appreciate” their campaign tactics. They have it coming.

No more running

A couple of years back, I wrote a column about how I’d started back running for exercise after a long layoff. I was 41 at the time I wrote it, and I was fairly enthusiastic about the shape I was in (for my age) at the time. Based on the tone of that column, I sounded pretty confident about holding off the effects of the getting older if I stayed on track with my exercise regimen.

Here are the last few sentences from that piece: “None of us can cheat the aging process, but our actions have a significant effect on how we look and feel as we travel down the road of time. I for one plan to keep on running as long as my body cooperates. And maybe in 30 years or so I’ll be ready for that water aerobics class. “

Looking back on it, I’m afraid I sound a little arrogant there. I sound like someone who had an inflated sense of the amount of control he has over life, fate, and his own health. Maybe I was setting myself up to be taught an important lesson. I think I’m learning that lesson now.

I haven’t gone running for at least three months. A slow walk is the best I can manage at present. I would tell you what’s wrong with me but I don’t know, and neither do the doctors I’ve seen. I’ve had plenty of expensive and unpleasant tests done, but I still don’t have any concrete answers. You would think that hearing “the tests all came back normal” from your doctor would be good news, but that’s not always the case.

So I don’t know what my problem is, and I don’t know if I’ll ever feel as good as I did when I wrote that column two years ago. But I always try to look on the bright side of things, and I can certainly say that the experience has made me a wiser (if less optimistic) person than I was back then. Here are a few of the things I’ve learned over the last few months.

- Taking care of your body increases your odds of staying as healthy as possible for the age that you are, but it is not a guarantee of good health. There are no such guarantees. Life is not like that.

- Medicine is not an exact science. The human body is an extremely complicated thing and there are many different things that can go wrong with it. Doctors have to make educated guesses a lot of the time, and they can’t always be right. Even the really good ones.

- One of the scariest things you will ever hear another human being say to you is this: “let’s put you on this medication and see how you do.”

- In a related note to that last point, all medications have side effects. And they usually aren’t good.

- It is very difficult to concentrate on anything else when you are preoccupied with wondering what exactly is going on with your body and whether or not it’s going to be better or worse tomorrow.

- Good health is probably at the top of the list of things that you don’t appreciate until you don’t have them anymore. But take my word for it - if you got out of bed this morning and started walking around without experiencing any pain or discomfort, you should be very, very thankful.

- I think that one of the highest complements you can ever hope to hear said about you is this – no matter what life threw at him, he never gave up.