One of the hardest things about being of a certain age is that the people you once depended on start to depend more and more on you. They need more from you – more time, more energy, more help doing things they used to do without help, sometimes even more money.

Sometimes, having an elderly person who depends on you means making decisions. It means painful conversations and losses of things that they never thought they’d lose. Have you ever needed to take driving privileges away from an older person? Have you ever told them they have to move into assisted living, or it’s impossible for them to live independently without help?

Was it easy? Did they just hand over the car keys? Did they just shrug and say “I’ll start packing?”

They probably didn’t. They probably fought you, told you you were wrong, you were crazy, that they’re fine, that maybe they’ve slowed down a little and have a little trouble doing things, but that’s just part of getting old. They’re fine. And they don’t want to hear it again.

But you have to bring it up again, because they’re not fine. And before they drive into a tree or burn the house down or hurt someone, you’re going to have to resolve this. And on and on it goes, you push them to give up something, they push back that they don’t need to, and you argue and put your head in your hands and want to give up. You want to say “fine, let them drive off a cliff.” I tried. I give up.

But you don’t give up, because if you love someone and you see something about themselves that they don’t, you have a duty to keep telling them it’s there until they believe you.

Now take all of that stubbornness and denial and refusal to accept what the people around you have long ago accepted – and make it about the most important job in the world, a job that a lot of other people think only you can do, and that you believe if you don’t do it, we descend into a fascist hellscape.

That’s the problem with Joe Biden running for president again. It’s not that we’re asking him to give up the car keys or the house he lived in for fifty years. We’re asking him to give up being the most powerful human on the planet. And he doesn’t want to.

We’re talking about Joe Biden the wrong way. We’re talking about him like a political candidate, and not like a person. A person who is aging in a very public and ugly way. He is 81 years old, and will be 86 at the end of a second term. And nobody knows what that means for him, for his presidency, and for the country. But it’s hard to see it as anything positive or comforting. Not anymore.

Aging isn’t linear. It’s a slow decline in your faculties and abilities and memory and judgement and temperament. For a while, Biden could walk that line. It appears now that, at a minimum, he’s having trouble walking it. And his halting, quiet, feeble, mush-mouthed, incoherent, extremely painful performance in the June presidential debate against Donald Trump (who, it should be noted, is also mush-mouthed and incoherent, just much louder) proved it.

Biden’s defenders believe that him stepping aside and handing the nomination over to someone else, be it Vice President Harris or another Democrat, will be a disaster. They might be right, of course. They might also not be. They believe that Biden just had a bad night, that he was jet-lagged and feeling sick, that he was over-prepared and restricted by said preparation and let lag and sickness from “letting it rip.”

And again, they might be right.

But if you’ve watched someone you love age, you know that the Biden we saw during the debate is probably closer to the real Biden than anyone wants to believe. Yes, older people can have better days than their worse days. But Biden is only going to get older. Whatever is going on with him might ebb and flow, but it won’t get better. Aging doesn’t go in reverse.

It might happen again. Maybe even worse. And it might happen again when it’s too late to make a change without it seeming like chaos and a total lack of planning.

The conversation about Joe Biden stepping aside is one we should have had years ago. It’s one that should have been had based on reality, on the cruelty of aging, on the idea that one man does not define a political party, and on the knowledge that once you reach a certain age, things start to go wrong in ways that can’t be fixed and so maybe we should act before those things go wrong. It’s not ableist or ageist to see an extremely old man who is clearly breaking down in the way that almost all extremely old people do and point it out. To take the car keys away before he hits someone.

We are being told by Biden loyalists, social media influencers, and die-hards that all of this is just bedwetting and a waste of resources and does nothing but help Trump by ignoring his many flaws and horrors in favor of a media frenzy being goosed by the right wing oligarchs and rat-fuckers that run everything. That Biden is fine, he had a bad night, his appearances since then have gone better, and that we need to suit up, shut up, and get in line.

I reject all of this.

I reject the idea that the movement to push Biden to step aside is just more of the “but her emails” nonsense that sunk the Clinton campaign in 2016. Hillary Clinton’s emails were a minor story that was relentlessly exploited by the right wind media machine who had spent decades trying to destroy her. And the idea that the far right was actually concerned about information security is laughable given their unblinking acceptance of Trump keeping untold classified documents in the bathroom of his golf resort.

I reject the idea that criticism of the Democratic Party and of Joe Biden’s stubbornness is tacit support for Trump. It’s the exact opposite, it’s wanting the Democrats to put forth the candidate who has the best chance to win, and being extremely concerned that this might not be Biden, and even if it is, we should probably talk about it while we can.

I reject that anyone who is having serious doubts about Biden’s ability to win again, his age, and his state of mind are “bedwetters” who are panicking over nothing. The debate we’re having now is the debate that should have been had last year. It’s the sign of a healthy party that puts the good of the country over the ego of one man. We have one party like that already – the Republicans. Just because they will support their man no matter what he does, says, or inflicts on anyone else doesn’t mean we should do the same.

I reject the idea that Democrats wouldn’t support another candidate if Biden were to step aside. Sure, there would be crabbing and bellyaching over Biden leaving the field, but it’s ludicrous to believe that Biden diehards would stay home rather than support another candidate who was already lock-step in beliefs with Biden. Democrats did support a potential Biden replacement already: Kamala Harris, who 81 million people voted to step in for Biden should something happen. Well, something happened.

And I reject the ludicrous conspiracy theories that Biden was sabotaged by a rogue soundman at CNN, the excuses that he was in Italy 12 days before and was too tired to debate, and the self-serving demands to “unite or die.” If Biden thinks that the scrutiny he’s getting from his own party is bad, wait until Trump – who has been uncharacteristically silent the last two weeks – starts on him.

At the moment, the far right has been content to let the two Biden factions battle each other. But that won’t last much longer, and Biden is going to have to defend not only his record and presidency from the right, but his sanity and health and basic ability to make decisions. And it won’t be for the good of the country, it will be for the good of Trump – a man who puts nothing above himself.

Joe Biden is not like that. He is a man who puts country over self. Not many people are like that. But everyone gets older. Everyone loses the ability to do things they used to be able to do.

And everyone has loved ones that at some point will have to step in and make the decisions they might not be able to make anymore.

Because Joe Biden the person has reached the point where while it might not get worse for a while, it won’t get better. It never does.

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This is the first post in what will be a relaunched TheMikeRothschild.com. For quite a while I’ve put it to the side while I work on bigger projects, but I’m missing the immediacy of regular writing. I hope to post twice a week, with one post more expressly political and/or fringe, and one a little more of a mix of things I care about and want to share. I hope you’ll share, subscribe, and do all the other things we ask readers to do these days. One post will be Monday or Tuesday, the other Wednesday or Thursday. I’ll develop more of a regular schedule as I go.

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Thanks for reading this far, and for everything!

(photo credit: Elizabeth Frantz/REUTERS)