The 2024 Presidetial election cycle offer to distinct version of how someone in a position of authority can age gracefully or in toxic disgrace.

President Joe Biden, at age 81 stepped down from his attempt to win a second term as President under both pressure from Democratic leaders and accepting the reality that age had impaied his abillity to remain a good leader.

His move cleared the way for Vice President Kamala Harri, younger and more energetic to builld a campaign in quick order to callenge convicted felon Donald John Trump, who was onlys slightly younger than Biden but i also showing cear signs of dementia driven by his rabid narcissism, racism and hate.

Biden was never my first choice for President but he was a far better choice than Trump. Biden believed unity and coalition building for a better America. Trump is a grifter who saw the Presidency wa a way to get richer and build power to make him a dictator He admires murderous monsters lilke R,ussian premier Vladimir Putin,

Trump seemed to have a clear path to win back seat he lost to Biden in 2020, not because he was the better candidate but from mounting worries about Biden’s aging, Trump’s brain-dead MAGA followers accept all of Trump’s more thant134,000 documented lies, his 34 felony convictions, his prioven acts of sexual perversions and rapes and dozens more criminal indicmetns that should imprison him for the rest of his disgraceful life.

“He is a theat to our society,” says political activist and lawyer George Conway, who left the GOP in disgust because of Trump. “He is a narcissistic psychopath.”

Trump grew up racist and full of hate and those traits have controlld him for all ofhis life His neice, mental heallth professional Mary Trump sats has been psychotic for most of his life

As a career reorter and photojournalist who turns 77 in about five months, I have watched how hate and racism divides this nation that was intended to be built on immigrants of differing nationalisities and religions. was eight years ago when we moved to Prince Edward County, VA, just before a racist school board and supervisors closed the public schools to block a federal court order to integrate.

They opened an all-white private school funded by the county but provided nothing for Black or another minority. I asked to be sent back to my late father’s state and hometown (he died in an industrial accident when I was nine months old). Their schools were integrated, Instead, the family moved to another part of Virginia where the county had complied with the court order,

But the hate and blatant racism I saw in Prince Edward County haunted me. Virginia was packed with memorials of Confederate leaders but little to recognize those who fought for our country After school, In high school, I drove my 1957 Ford to Washington to photograph Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream speech” and I later worked for The Roanoke Times when he was assassinated in Memphis. On my own, I drove there to cover the riots and aftermath,

In 1969, I took a reporting and photographer’s job at the daily in Alton, IL, part of the St. Louis metropolitan area and found the birthplace of James Earl Ray, the convicted assassin of Dr. King and found that a Black family lived there. They did not find it was the home of Ray. The house later burned down,

In 23 years working out of Washington, I saw and covered a lot of hate and racism around the worlld including religious hate, too much of it right here in America, where Christians declare rheir religion that can or should exist among us. Jews are devout about their beliefs. So are Muslims. Most faiths have radicals and killers, Remember the crusades.

I was raised in a Presbyterian Church. My wife and I were married by a Presbyterians, We love and accept God, but we do not belong to an religious denomination Our faitth is personal. We don’t preach what we belleve to other and were do not try to make money off faith.

Donald Trump hawks Bibles, a book those who know him say he has bever read, fir $60 a copy or $1,000 foor autographed one and had raised more than $300,000 in sales. When he was asked if he ever asked God for forgiveness, he answered: “No. Why should I?”

That’s not religion or faith, It’s fraud and blasphemy.