‘Old people need to take a driving test to keep their license!” That’s a topic young students sometimes propose during the persuasion unit of a composition or public speaking course.

One fortunate aspect of teaching at a community college is that I have students of nontraditional ages who will raise their hands and ask, “What age group of drivers has the most accidents?” These students are the elders who help educate younger members of society. They’re as essential to a classroom as they always have been to families, tribes and villages.

That’s when I ask the young students to use their cellphones to answer the elder’s question. After about 30 seconds of frantic searching, I hear a lot of sighing when they discover that young drivers are far more likely to be involved in traffic accidents.

This is usually when another class elder will ask, “Isn’t it discrimination if we only make one group take a driving test when other groups are at least as accident-prone?” Yes, that’s discrimination. “Could we avoid discrimination if we test all drivers every few years?” Yes, dear elder, we could.

All this brings to mind a recent proposal by Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley. She called for “mandatory mental competency tests for politicians over 75 years old.” Age discrimination? Yes, clearly.

Taking our cue from the class elders, maybe all candidates for office should be tested on their competence with questions about basic issues related to government. We don’t want incompetent people running our country, do we? Let’s have issue-competency tests for political candidates, regardless of age.

For example, one useful question might be, “Is Haley’s age discrimination a good idea?” Any candidate who answers “yes” should immediately be removed from the ballot for incompetence. Haley recently upped her commitment to age discrimination when she said that Joe Biden “doesn’t care that [Medicare] runs out in five or 10 years. He’s not going to be there anymore.”

Invoking and speeding along the death of a fellow human being is deeply offensive and incompetent. So much for Haley positioning herself as a “nice/competent” alternative to Donald Trump.

How about the Confederate flag? Does it stand for racism, sedition and hate? Or does it symbolize “service, sacrifice and heritage?” Any politician who says “service, sacrifice and heritage” might make a swell leader for a racist group protesting equality in bygone days, but that person isn’t competent to represent a wide range of citizens in a contemporary democracy. (This is the point when we should pull out our cellphones and Google Haley’s name and the phrase, “service, sacrifice and heritage.” Yep, she said it.)

The recent pandemic and important social issues might also be good topics for competency questions. Here’s a simple true-or-false question: ”Wokeness is a virus more dangerous than any pandemic.” Haley herself made this obviously false claim at the recent fringy, cringy, far-right CPAC convention.

Clearly, neither “C” in “CPAC” stands for “competence.” To Haley and her incompetent CPAC friends, “wokeness” (having empathy for others and being honest about history) is somehow worse than the pandemic deaths of more than a million Americans and nearly 7 million people worldwide. That kind of thinking is profoundly incompetent.

We could ask competency questions about any number of important issues, and most Republican candidates would fail. Unfortunately, today’s Republican Party relies more on dishonesty to generate outrage than on being factually accurate and proposing policies that help everyday Americans. Can we agree that dishonest outrage isn’t compatible with competence?

Of course, Haley’s misguided proposal for an age-based competency test is aimed at Biden and Trump, both of whom are over 75.

Trump has been proving his incompetence for decades. Consider that his company was fined by the U.S. government for racial discrimination in its housing practices back in 1973 when Trump was less than half of Haley’s magical age of 75. Racism is one of the worst forms of incompetence for a politician. Maybe the only thing worse is lying about an election and instigating an insurrectionist attack against the United States, which Trump also did five months before turning 75.

Can we please agree that insurrection makes Trump and his fellow instigators incompetent to hold office?

Biden is 80, and Republicans have made his mental competence central to their misinformation campaign against him. Sure, he says some goofy things now and then and sometimes mangles his words while compensating for a lifelong stutter. But he had the mental dexterity to extemporize on live television during the recent State of the Union address when he managed to get dishonest, heckling Republicans to promise to abandon their efforts to cut Social Security and Medicare.

Biden bested these younger, incompetent hecklers with ease.

Equating age with incompetence is obviously discriminatory. Yes, it’s nice to have a youthful president. The days of Barack Obama come to mind, for example, with a younger Vice President Biden by his side. But the older President Biden has overseen significant legislative accomplishments at home and shown inspiring leadership against authoritarian aggression abroad.

He’s been running circles around the Republicans who keep claiming that he’s incompetent. Our nation benefits from this very competent village elder instead of his incompetent Republican rivals.

John Sheirer is an author and teacher from Florence. His latest book is the award-winning, “Stumbling Through Adulthood: Linked Stories.” Find him at JohnSheirer.com.]]>