17 September 2020
In the next week I will receive my ballot from the East Lansing, Michigan’s city clerk’s office. When it arrives, please have no doubt I will vote for Joe Biden. At this point nothing is going to change my mind. Biden wasn’t my first choice, but he is so much better than the alternative.
Personally, I have had enough of the debacles that President Trump has handed us as a nation. From the inept response to Covid 19, to the estrangement from our allies, to the ethics morass that is William Barr, to the divisions that the President has fostered between segments of the American people with such fervor that has rendered reasoned debate and compromise impossible, I have seen enough. He has one by one taken bad situations and made them incredibly, if not irrevocably, worse. The only people who have really benefited from his actions are the wealthy who received their gift early on in his administration with the passage of his tax bill. So be it. It is what it is.
I am older than I once was. Maybe, I am wiser, but then again maybe not. But I have made the decision to head off to the water’s edge in a country far from here. I am tired and I don’t have the fight left in me for what is coming. Yesterday I sent off for an updated criminal history check from the FBI. This is step one in the process to become a permanent resident of a European country. No matter who wins or who loses I don’t feel like my voice will make a difference. So, I am going to find a beach somewhere and eat seafood and watch the waves, maybe I will even get to see some of those 80-100-foot-tall salt water monsters crashing the shoreline.
Our democracy is at a tipping point. Donald Trump with his admiration of autocratic leaders, his impulses to emulate them with the use of Federal forces to put down legitimate protests, and his “joke” about wanting three terms, stands as a stark existential threat to our democracy. His repeated language stating that if he loses it will happen because of electoral fraud, is so contrary to truth and to what is required to keep a democracy alive, it hard to fathom a leader of this country actually saying such things out loud.
I am not going to tell you how to vote. If you want to know about the election there exist legitimate news sources you can plumb to evaluate the platforms of the party’s, the records of the incumbent and the challenger and the goals and philosophies of all involved. Dedicated long extant news sources are not fake news no matter what President Trump repeatedly claims and are a good starting point.
Hey, if I make it to the shore of the great sea in one piece, and if the pussy grabbing, disability mocking, racist, piece of poo gets re-elected, I will try and keep a bedroom open for you to come and decompress in. With some wine in hand and some whitefish in front of us, we will be able to talk about love and life and how God resides in the endless rhythms of the ocean.
Get out while you can, my friend......before you or someone you love join the 2 - 6 MILLION Americans who will die to give drumpf the “herd mentality” (immunity) his administration is seeking.
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