This Could Be Our Last Democratic Election

Time to talk about voting.

Yes, I know. Just hearing the word makes you dream of moving to France under an assumed name so you never have to think about politics. 

Well, you can’t. 2020 has destroyed much about our lives that we took for granted, and apolitical bliss is just one more on the list.

We’ve never had an election like this one. For all intents and purposes, this might be the last Democratic election of our lifetimes. If Trump wins, fixing the dog’s breakfast he’s making of our government would require decades. Plural. 

Countless lives will be destroyed, tilled into obscurity by the uncaring totalitarian plow.

We’re supposed to be THE beacon of Democratic norms: The peaceful transition of power, the rights of every citizen to vote, and for those votes to be cast in a calm and non-threatening environment.

Trump is stirring up his followers to form ‘an electoral oversight army’ to ‘guard’ the polls from ‘fraud’. 

Yeah, sure Jan.

The Republican party has sold their soul to get what they’ve wanted from this abhorrent man. Even now, at the very end, where there exist no moral nor political arguments for Trump’s re-election, they are willing to debase themselves even further. 

They have turned back the clock, reaching into the past to dredge up the worst of our anti-Democratic playbook.

America has always dealt with gender, racial, and monetary inequalities when it comes to suffrage. It stems from the forming of the nation under the geise of slavery and the failures of Reconstruction. 

Republicans have openly stated the following: Any vote that isn’t for Trump shouldn’t actually count.

Power is all that matters to them, and they have abandoned any sense of shared citizenship to obtain victory by hook or by crook.

Think about that. Significant rulings have come down the pipe in the last few months. Hell, some of them have happened in the last few days. All of which have been justified using the same specious reasoning or out-right falsehoods; If you might vote for a Democratic candidate, you shouldn’t be allowed to vote at all. 

They are inventing straws out of thin air to grasp at all in service of justifying the outcome they determined before they even considered the merits of the cases in front of them.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh ruled on voting rights in such an egregiously disingenuous fashion that the state in question HAD TO CALL A SITTING SUPREME COURT JUSTICE OUT FOR THEIR BULLS!@#.

It’s terrifying to watch, because this is how Dictatorships are born.

It’s why the cry from so many has become the same: Vote. More importantly, you must vote in person or at the drop-box, because mailing in your ballot is no longer an option. 

Why, you ask?

Because Republicans, including the President of the United States, have attempted to argue in complete bad faith and in direct defiance of every single law governing elections that votes which are counted after Election day are illegal and shouldn’t be counted.

That’s a thing they are doing.

Look, I get that the Democratic party has its flaws. There are lots of them to choose from.

Regardless of all that nonsense, the Democratic party is now the only political party interested in retaining a democracy instead of turning us into a mostly-fascist minority-ruled s@#$-show. 

Sensationalist? 

I wish. I wish with every fiber of my being that I didn’t have enough evidence to keep me up at night for each point I was making.

I could write a five-thousand word post of nothing but source material headlines.

That should chill you to the marrow. It should stir your ire until you are near the boiling-point. It should galvanize you into action so swiftly that you leave rubber on the pavement from running so fast. 

It should move you, but for so many it still hasn’t struck home just how dire our situation has truly become.

Too many think they can sit this out, let it blow over, and continue with their lives without having to inconvenience themselves.

Look around you. Schools closed, businesses closed, an economy in shambles, and hundreds of thousands of Americans are already dead with hundreds of thousands more about to meet the same horrible end.

Trump and the current GOP don’t care about you. At all. McConnell freaking laughed derisively on national television after heated questions on his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic that has slain more than 230,000 Americans and given hundreds of thousands more potentially life-long complications. 

Nothing restrains them, because they view 1984 as a how-to guide instead of the cautionary tale that it was meant to be. They have no principle but power, no love of anything but obtaining more authority no matter what it costs those they are supposed to serve.

Men and women willing to casually trample their constituents to retain the political authority that they then refuse to use during an unprecedented time of crisis is unacceptable.

My son deserves to inherit something. If the current GOP had their way, it won’t be anything other than a scorched wasteland populated only by the dead and the dying all in the service of their true gods: Money and Power.

So, for the sake of my son, for the sake of your own children and grandchildren, you need to vote. Not protest vote, not write in vote, not claim you voted but never actually bothered to do so.

Vote and make sure your vote is counted by voting in person. 

Further, it is imperative that you vote for Joe Biden. Vote for every Democratic option on the ticket. The stakes are way too high to do anything else.

Vote like you care. Vote like you want all this madness to end.