It's Election Day in America
It’s Election Day in the United States of America. A day of moral reckoning. A day that will live alongside FDR’s landslide, Truman holding the paper declaring Dewy the winner, George Bush and the hanging chads down in sunny Florida, and of course, the horror show known as the entire season of 2016 politics. We’ve heard the same phrase in our cars on the way to pick up the kids or grabbing some tacos – “this election is the most important of our lifetimes.” It’s not conjecture.
There’s a misunderstanding that we’re voting for Biden because we love him – plenty of us don’t. Despite knowing that more qualified candidates were pushed aside thanks to the DNC machine, we tolerate his platform. In a different time, we’d be allowed a protest vote of fuck you. This time, it’s different. A vote for Joe Biden isn’t a valentine. It’s a vote against Donald Trump.
The silver lining of such a high voter turnout is that many races feature down-ticket voices looking for systemic change. The backslapping Washington nonsense era is as dead as disco. Fuck that.
Trump, for all of his pomp and circumstance, didn’t pass a new healthcare plan (even one that helped during a pandemic), didn’t make Mexico pay for a half-built wall, didn’t get COVID cases to zero, didn’t end the North Korea nuke program, and didn’t win a trade war. He did stoke racial tensions to their absolute max, citing some “very fine people” when a protestor was killed, and he’s also made a few tax cuts for the rich, which have been statistically proven not to help the middle class whatsoever. But, hey, MAGA, right?
I saw a comment that said “we don’t know how good we have it.” And they’re right. We don’t. Our citizens have done amazing things. This country is founded on and has kept (despite sketchy means of achievement) is our cultural identity that you can do anything here. We’ve never seen carpet bombs, our children aren’t living in a modern-day holocaust like Yemen, and our citizens aren’t in breadlines like so many countries worldwide. Instead, we throw away food. And have spent a pandemic making TikTok videos and watching Netflix.
We’ve seen the “Trump Trains” they’re impossible to miss with their flags, stickers, and slogans like “Fuck Your Feelings – Trump 2020.” The Trump Trains block traffic on major bridges in New York City, Washington D.C., and New Jersey. Last weekend, one tried to run a Biden campaign bus off the road. It’s become so much of a problem; the FBI is investigating a member of one of these trains rammed into a volunteer car. Did Trump condemn any action on behalf of his mob? Nope. He tweeted a video of the chase with the caption, “I LOVE TEXAS.” And then went on to defend his acolytes, citing safety reasons, but doubled down against his detractors. “In my opinion, these patriots did nothing wrong,” Trump tweeted on Sunday about FBI investigation, instead suggesting the Bureau and the Department of Justice should investigate “the terrorists, anarchists, and agitators of ANTIFA.” There’s no comment that these same people who cheer for shutting down a bridge for Trump would be the first to throw the book at anyone shutting down traffic for a protest for any other reason.
Why would you want to live in this America? What does the Trump Train symbolize? It’s that people are scared to lose their place at the table.
It starts with Obama. When mediocre white people saw a black guy rise to power, it was the beginning of the end for the status quo. Ask a person who’s a tried and true Obama-hater, and they’ll spout off nonsense about his record, but it’s typically hot air about how he “divided the country.” All Obama did was wear a tan suit and shoot three-pointers and get an armload of awards. Was his presidency perfect? No. There were drone strikes, the Fast and Furious scandal, and he helped the infrastructure of kids being in cages. He also did far more good than bad, like saving the economy from recession, helped gay marriage become legal, Obamacare (they still haven’t replaced it,) and kill Osama Bin Laden.
But, back in the Obama days, Trump lived on Fox News. He created the birther scenario, that he was an undercover Muslim. This is a fundamentally flawed point of view because giving basic-ass white people a target, a pinata to be mad at, the lie gave them identity. The thing about being a white dude is we’re given a lot of chances to fuck up. We get better schools, don’t live in food deserts, and most people don’t throw applications away based on our names. We aren’t populating jails and not murdered by cops monthly. I’m aware that there are poor rural white people in West Virginia. The thing is that if they left West Virginia, the deck isn’t stacked against them. They’re still white, and they can walk into a place and get a fair shot. Our darker pigmented friends do not get that luxury.
There’s the timeless quote from Ronald Wright, “John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” By and large people are ok with mediocrity, but will also blame someone not like them if they’re found out.
The Trump obsessive identity has become a calling, a way to scream about how unfulfilled someone’s life is by joining a club. No other political figure has had people waving flags, wearing hats, putting gigantic stickers on their cars. At best, you saw a few black folks in airbrushed tee shirts from the mall a few days after Obama won. There weren’t stores dedicated to letting people know that they’re unified assholes. The last time we saw identity politics like this, people wore armbands, resulting in dead Jews.
We’ve also managed to politicize a global pandemic, resulting in the loss of 225,000 Americans. Schools and businesses have closed, Halloween was weird, and so will the holidays. Did Trump or Republicans do anything aside from a small stimulus and a beefed-up but temporary unemployment boost for workers laid off? Well, nope.
Because of the administration’s brutal policy for immigrant children, 545 kids have no idea where their parents are. Did some good things happen during Trump’s presidency? I can’t tell. I was too busy cringing every time his name was mentioned over a new gaff. The Trump presidency has induced a cultural panic attack that’s unrelenting and has diminished a section of American identity: we can’t just exist. There’s always the looming “what next?” A perpetual state of emergency isn’t sustainable.
Donald Trump brings out the worst in America. His campaign is based on problems his administration created. He inherited his economic infrastructure, and racists weren’t parading around with long guns and Hawaiian shirts. Remember when Obama was in office? Ask yourself what your biggest fear was - you know the fundamental answer will not be the same. You also know had Clinton won, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, either.
If Biden gets the job, we must hold him accountable - for anyone who’s been stopped by a bad cop, or worse, killed by one. We have to make sure folks across the color palette have a shot at their American Dream. This one is for the gays, the trans folks, the indigenous people, and any woman who’s ever had an abortion. But, we also need to bring the Trump Train folks back. We need to help them into the conversation of not being alone, that they do matter, that we can help them affirm their place in a changing landscape. To say, “fuck them” is what got us here in the first place. We can do better and be better than our recent history.