To the Voters

Election Day is tomorrow! Who else has a stomach ache??

You don’t need me to tell you this election season has been fraught. First of all, we haven’t had an election year that hasn’t made our collective cortisol spike since before 2016. Pretty much all of the US has gone through a revelatory upheaval in the last eight years. We’ve had to deeply reckon with our communities, our organizations, our systems of government, our religious institutions. We may have even had to draw new boundary lines with friends and family. We’ve all watched people we thought we knew to be kind and caring align themselves with a misogynistic narcissist more than once. We’ve witnessed people we once considered close refuse to make basic efforts to protect their communities in a global pandemic. We’ve seen parents and aunts and uncles become obsessed with lies and conspiracies. We have, in essence, watched helplessly as our nation has torn itself asunder, bowing to individualistic algorithms and wholly isolated experiences.

All of that to say, it’s been rough!! Our nervous systems are frayed! And to put a disgusting, goopy maraschino cherry on top of this absolute shit-stain of an ice cream sundae, we’ve all watched just as helplessly over the last year as our country has continuously bankrolled some of the worst scenes of death and devastation that any of us have seen in our lifetimes.

If you haven’t been paying attention, welcome: you live in America, where the powers that be form a patriarchal, capitalist empire. Our taxes go toward an obscene military budget. Our creature comforts are bought and paid for by ancestors who stole land from indigenous people, killed them, and called it their own. Maybe not your ancestors. But we’re all benefitting from their sins (or finding our necks underneath the boot of them — perhaps a little of both). Either way, we all have blood on our hands. There’s no room for purity codes here.

You may not be happy with the Democratic Party, which has inched closer and closer to the political center in a country where the Republican Party has taken giant steps toward fascism. You may not be happy that America doesn’t have ranked choice voting. You may not be happy that your options for voting in this country are “hateful narcissistic fascist dictator” and “Neo liberal capitalist who’s Not Enough of a Democratic Socialist for My Tastes and hasn’t done enough to stop the violence in Gaza and is saying things like ‘we will have the strongest, most lethal military in the world’ to court the vote of your friend’s dad who thinks the rest of the world will think we’re weak for having a woman as President, even though there’s evidence upon evidence to believe she’s the only option who won’t actively make things worse.” You may be tired of voting for the “lesser of two evils;” I’m tired after writing that chaotic run-on sentence. And I get it! We do deserve a better world. We deserve candidates who work for us, not just for the richest billionaires, not for the corporate interests that strip away our natural resources, and not for the warmongers who claim killing as their birthright.

But we don’t get a better world if we don’t show up in this moment. We don’t get a better world if we don’t work our asses off within the boundaries of the one we have. You don’t change American politics overnight. A third party vote may be worth something in the distant future, when we’ve abolished the Electoral College and have ranked choice voting. It may be worth something somewhere closer to the near future, if a third party candidate could run and win in local elections and prove that they’re not just an election cicada who shows up to grift people’s money every four years. It takes time to make change. It’s incremental; it takes decades. I know this, because I’ve seen it happen before. I watched it happen from inside the house.

I was raised in the Evangelical Christian church. That shit was my bread and butter. I spent 13 years in a private Christian school in the Bible Belt, where Fundamentalist ideas and conservative politics bled into Bible classes and PE classes and Math classes. My 7th grade algebra teacher spent about 30% of her time with us that year making us get on our knees and pray for Israel (no, I’m not joking; yes, I’m still bad at math, and yes, I do kinda blame her for it!). I was taught in great detail about how our government worked. We wrote fake bills in speech classes and tried to convince our fellow 9th graders to vote our “bills” into “law.” I was sent to Youth in Government with my fellow high school classmates, to debate against other schools about why we believed abortion should be illegal, and why outdated blue laws should remain in tact — all very conservative perspectives. People talked about Roe v. Wade like it was a curse word. My school’s teachers spent entire 50-minute weekly chapels telling us about the evils of abortion and pre-marital sex. I watched as classmates of mine went to protests at the state capitol and put red tape over their mouths scrawled with the word “LIFE.” I sat through video curriculum in “Bible” classes that were pure political propaganda machines, attempting to indoctrinate the class with arguments against “Postmodern thinking” and left-leaning politics.

My point is, for the last 50 years, Republicans and the Christian Right employed major strategies to gain political power and overturn Roe v. Wade. And they did everything from indoctrinating school children to lying to Christian communities about the real reasons they wanted power (it was for racism; hard to believe, I know!) to getting out the down-ballot vote in both local and national elections to get it done. Their consistent messaging galvanized their base to show up to the polls, and ultimately, they ended up putting some of the worst people the US has to offer in power. That’s how we ended up with Mitch McConnell in the Senate, who repeatedly blocked Obama from installing a moderate Supreme Court Justice in 2015, then rushed through three conservative Supreme Court Justices during Donald Trump’s time in office, giving the Supreme Court a conservative lead and ultimately denying women the right to choose what happens to their own bodies in 2022.

50 years. That’s more than half a lifetime, if you’re lucky. But they saw what they wanted, and they organized to get it done. And now, millions of women are suffering for it.

If you are living in America today and you are paying attention, you probably exist at a constant low thrum of rage and anxiety and exhaustion. And you are right to be furious. You are right to want the violence in Gaza to stop yesterday. You are right to be appalled by our nation’s complicity in Israel’s crimes. I’m furious, too. I’m appalled, too. But the unfortunate thing about living in America is that, historically speaking (and no matter what they might try to tell you), change does not happen in one election cycle. When we elect a President and find that, four years later, fewer and fewer campaign promises were fulfilled, we can’t let our disappointment make us apathetic.

We have to be aware of how government works — that the President is not all-powerful, that the House and Senate and judicial branch of our government also has a lot of control over what laws get passed and what progress gets made — and if one branch leans more conservative than the others, progress gets stopped at every turn. When you bow out of this election because the choice feels too difficult, or you vote for a third party candidate in a system where winning as a third party is mathematically impossible, you automatically lend power to Donald Trump by giving up yours.

If you wanted to protest with your vote, you had an opportunity in the primaries to vote “uncommitted,” letting Biden know just how many of us were not okay with his long leash on Netanyahu. But now it’s Election Day, and there are real and immediate consequences to deciding that your own intellectual purity matters more than the lives of every person in the United States who is not a white, cis, straight male, and, frankly, more than every person in Gaza who you claim to want to protect. If you vote third party in an attempt to make a statement about your feelings against Israel’s brutality, and Trump wins this election, how are you going to feel? How are you going to feel, knowing you could have placed a vote in direct opposition to him, instead of putting your vote towards someone who only acts as a spoiler to the one candidate who could stand in his way?

I know that Democrats and Republicans both adopt poor foreign policies. Again, surprise, we live in a capitalist military empire. But we can still fight for the change we want to see, both at home and abroad, under a Harris/Walz Presidency. We can still sway the minds of our down-ballot representatives if we vote for them knowing they have our best interests at heart, if we write to them and let them know what the people they represent want. And when all else fails, we can get involved in our communities, actually talk to people to see what it is we all want and need, and work with one another to make change happen. Progress in this country is more about moving needles than moving mountains. Go vote for Harris/Walz and down-ballot Democrats tomorrow. Set the needle moving. The change we want to see can happen when we drop our apathy and start fighting for it.

Over decades, if we have to.