Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Pittsburgh, The End Of the World, and a New Way of Thinking

The Need For Bold Thinking and how Mayan Elders predicted Pittsburgh's Point where its Three Rivers Meet would play a role in ushering in a new age of civilization

A few years back, I met  a spiritual psychotherapist Vikki Hanchin who came to a screening of a documentary I had made, My Tale of Two Cities, and told me how she had been in touch with a group of Mayan elders who believed that Pittsburgh with its  confluence of the three rivers at The Point, together with the "underground river" that feeds the fountain, are an exact match for the "Tree of Life" or "World Tree" that the Maya saw at the center of the Milky Way. That, they say, makes it a very important portal to another world.

You may recall the disaster movie 2012 Hollywood made in 2009 which predicted a an apocalyptic moment of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis,  and global floods related to an ancient Mayan prediction of what would happen in that year.  But Vikki explained to me that it was not a physical destruction that the Mayans believed in, but a new way of thinking that would emerge.  I attended a drum circle downtown with the Mayans and got a better sense of how they believed Western Pennsylvania because of its unique topography and convergence would play a role in that transformation.

Now I realize that some of this might be like when you buy a green Volvo and suddenly notices other green Volvos in parking lots. I am someone afterall who literally ended up on The Oprah Winfrey Show for of all things leaving my Hollywood life as a screenwriter to teach back in my hometown at the University of Pittsburgh.   And I have spent the past two decades wondering if being summoned to be on Oprah, the close we have to a modern day oracle, was part of some moment of destiny or just a cosmic joke.  

But the events of the past weeks, with Donald Trump almost being assassinated in nearby Butler PA, less than an hour from my house, potentially changing the trajectory of the election, has me thinking. And even some of my cynical New York friends who view Pittsburgh as Alaska are now wondering why Pittsburgh keeps coming up on the national political stage.  Pittsburgh was afterall where Joe Biden announced his 2020 run for President with the head of the US Steelworkers.  Pundits keep saying Pennsylvania could be the key swing state, and while New York and DC based journalists and pollsters focus a lot on the Philly suburbs, it was the Pittsburgh region they missed so badly that had them fail to predict the 2016 Trump election.  My friend comedian Louie Anderson knew.  He had a gig twenty minutes from my house in Monroeville PA well before the conventions that year and he noticed how the crowd didn’t like it when he made fun of Trump.

But let’s talk about that “new way of thinking” and the current election.  The country is thirsty for something different.  Even diehard Democrats were sounding like they have fallen into dispair. Our crazy world seems even crazier as some see the Republican Party’s Heritage Foundation drive Project 2025 as a plan to make this country into The Handmaid’s Tale.  Some see the liberal left of the Democratic party as advocating for Hamas terrorists and caring more for the rights of marginalized individuals while ignoring if not downright abandoning the real pain of what millions of once middle class Americans who cannot buy a house, pay for groceries and gas, and are struggling to recover from traumas from the aftermath of the pandemic and job losses to the fentanyl crisis which the RNC convention put center stage. 

After the Trump Election in 2016, I had written a piece “A Tale of Two Countries” about the strangeness of Pittsburgh politics where for decades you had liberal Republicans like John Heinz and philanthropist Elsie Hillman and socially conservative Democrats who still went to church and had families which worked in steel mills for generations.  We are the real life Mister Rogers Neighborhood, but as we explored in My Tale of Two Cities, the factories which Fred Rogers showed on his iconic television show produced here are long go.  In the Fred Rogers Studio, I asked Fred’s trusted delivery man Mr. McFeely (actor David Newell), what could we make next?  David was optimistic as Pittsburgh has long been a place which reinvented itself from the Steel Capitol of the World to The Transplant Capitol of the World to a town which has become somehow of a tech and movie hub.  But many in this region are still angry and suffering and longing for something new.

Pittsburghers pride themselves in being humble, hard-working people who appreciate people who do what they say they are going to do, and Joe Biden who promised to be a transitional president, has now made good on his word.  Those who were in despair in the voices of my neighbors—both Democrats and Republicans—that our choices are two doddering old men, now have a choice.   Many here believe Joe. has been a good and honorable President who helped us rebound from the pandemic and has now made the courageous decision to be the kind of leader like George Washington was when he ‘passed the torch” instead of holding onto party.  (Footnote: As a young solder for the British before the revolution, George Washington accidentally shot a French diplomat setting off the French/Indian War or what people here call “The War that Made America.”). Joe like George could be a real hero in showing us how doing the right thing for this country matters most.

Some believe the Trump/Vance victory is inevitable.  If you want to see how to use Midwest roots to persuade voters, J.D. Vance and his Hillbilly Elegy is a textbook case.  But if you want to counteract Trump’s call to his base “fight, fight, fight”, now Democrats can begin fighting back as Joe Biden graciously handed the ball off to Kamala Harris. There is of course whoever she will chose as a running mate, where it is Arizona Senator Mark Kelly or surprising people by picking Governor Gretchen Whitmer. But now matter who is the second half of the ticket, they will standing there at the DNC Convention alongside Joe Biden, former Presidents Barack Obama Bill Clinton, and Hillary Clinton and many of the rising stars of the Democratic party letting Americans know they have been heard and it is time for something new.  

Some may say it is hard enough to get a woman elected, much less a woman who is part African American and also from Indian descent. Back in the 1990s, when I was living in L.A., I wrote a memo of how Bill Clinton should go on MTV— a practice then not done by serious politicians. A friend got it to the Clinton advisers whereupon I was chastized by James Carville who reminded me how young people don’t vote.  When Clinton fell to third in the polls, George Stephenapolous, then a Clinton aide (from Cleveland by the way), called me and said they were putting the Governor on Arsenio and then MTV. I was in Little Rock, at Clinton Headquarters when George crossed to me and said it was the young people who made the difference.

Could two women on a ticket in 2024 be like Bill Clinton and Al Gore and give voters who did not support Hilary Clinton a do over and usher in a new era of politics?  It is a risk, but so is doing nothing.  And if it works imagine what a message it will send to women across the world, and to everyone who respects women and believes in their wisdom and capabilities. Whatever happens in November, our country will be a very different place.  And half our country will feel like it is the end of the world.

When we were making “My Tale of Two Cities”, we met a French/Indian War re-enactor with a musket who told us how “you can’t kill Pittsburgh as this place is the heart of America.”  We ended the movie singing Pittsburgh’s unofficial theme song “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” with Pittsburghers on Broadway, in Beverly Hills and at that point The Mayans believed was so sacred.   

In our film, we visited with Franco Harris, Joanne Rogers, Teresa Heinz Kerry, and other iconic Pittsburgh neighbors and asking them if Pittsburgh, which was facing bankrupcy, could once again become “the City of Champions?” But Vikki Hankin saw something deeper in this Pittsburgh comeback tale, and suggested that if the forces align, Pittsburgh could become Peaceburgh. Joanne Rogers told me how when Fred went on trips, he would come back and tell her what “wonderful neighbors we have out there.”   Let’s hope no matter what happens in this election, we can still remember that.

Regardless of what happens in November, it is time to call on the wisdom of those Mayan Elders and start discovering a new way of thinking. 

You can watch the trailer for My Tale of Two Cities with everyone singing “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8KHfDPoAhk

You can watch Kamala on CNN’s Townhall here to get more a sense of her:

And the whole movie here: