“It’s been a wild ride having PD this week” is a hell of an understatement. We barely had time to celebrate the signing of the Somebody-Should-Do-Something-About-All-The-Problems Act before we started inspecting it for signs of micrographia.

I am unqualified to opine on a diagnosis, as I have neither thoroughly examined Biden’s medical records nor have I been watching his public behavior particularly keenly for my own sanity. Having Parkinson’s makes you feel 81 years old – there’s no point in me reading into the gait of a man that is already 81 years old. And, let’s cut to the chase here – people are speculating that he has Parkinson’s mostly because it gives them cover to convict him of the grave sin they think he is actually guilty of: being old. Which I am not denying that he is. But the insidious implication here is that having Parkinson’s makes you fundamentally unqualified to be President. (Or, at the least, less qualified than if one directed a violent mob to attack Congress and thus prevent the peaceful transfer of power following an election that ended one’s Presidency, regardless of what the 14th amendment might explicitly say.) Which is a rather bitter pill for me to swallow, considering that I only recently became eligible when I turned 35 some weeks ago.

I had marked 2024 on my calendar in 2008. I was 19 at the time, when we all are enormous narcissists and think we are capable of anything. And, while I was as extreme a skeptic then as I am now, I had also just witnessed what seemed like a miracle at the time (and once again seems one now): a (relative) liberal had won the election for President. Not just anyone, but one who was from a major urban center in the north, unabashedly smart, young, Black, and yet somehow still won Indiana. In that moment, my teenage self realized that, if everything went to hell in the following 16 years, America had worse options than a nerdy brown millennial with a gargantuan ego who paves his own path with a rigid moral compass paired with a lack of empathy.*

Sixteen years. It is a convenient metaphor to say that sixteen years ago I identified with Obama, and sixteen years later I am now identified with Biden. I know I am not the only one in this country who feels like they have aged several decades in that time, but it cuts a little closer to the truth for me. I was a young adult then, having gotten the hang of passing successfully for a normal human being and barely needing to use my brain to get through college, with only a few curious symptoms occasionally disrupting what turned out to be my physical peak. And now I take more than sixteen pills a day, and keep a collapsible walking stick in my bag just in case. An incompetent, incoherent, demented doddard – when you think that of an old man, what makes you assume that he must have what I have? Is that how you see me? Or do you want to push me out the door as well because you fear so much of what others might think of me – and of you by association? Am I inherently unfit in the eyes of the society you are part of?

And even if I am, at 35, a bumbling old fool who is simply trying to do the best he can for himself and for everyone else, is mustering more effort just to get out of bed each morning so that I can serve that purpose than you exert in your entire week a mark against me?