Today is National Voter Registration Day. The fourth Tuesday of every September is always National Voter Registration Day. It’s the first I’ve heard of it.
I don’t like losing. I don’t like not getting what I want. I grow livid with the injustices I see and the indifference of society at large. I am tired of hearing about the injustices and then not seeing anything - constructive and lasting - happen. I am tired of hearing about the lower castes of our segregated nation pleading that they can’t breathe, that they don’t understand why we can’t just get along, that they have a right to be wherever they might be and yet the higher caste pulls the gun or calls the cops or yells bloody murder. I am enraged by the nonsense too many of us believe. I am dismayed by the lack of civility by everyone who disagrees with me from the president down to the lowliest lowlife on the internet. I am disheartened by the people who see the ‘American carnage’ but are going to vote their white privilege anyway. I am disgusted by the bastardization of the news where opinion seeps into every story and every story is geared to make you want to click to read it. I am appalled that a majority of white people - a majority of white women! - are going to cast their vote in favor of the carnival barker who plays to their worst fears and who actually is the manifestation of their waking nightmares. I am angry at how our indifference as citizens has brought us to this tipping point. I am aggrieved for those who took our president at his word and died for it. I am equally aggrieved for those who became collateral damage. And for those who will become collateral damage.
He listened to the intelligence reports.
He knew how the virus spread.
He knew how deadly it was.
He knew it wasn’t miraculously going to go away.
He wasn’t trying not to panic people. He was trying not to panic the stock market.
He knew the worse and continued to say it was ‘a hoax’.
He protected himself while he played it down.
Tweeting from his ‘brown throne bully pulpit’ like Mad King George.
If the deaths from the coronavirus were as dramatic as the two skyscrapers being destroyed before our very eyes on national television, maybe Americans would pay better attention.
Instead the deaths are slow and nationwide and mostly affect people not like us or people who are old and no longer visible and we treat it like the endless wars each and every administration has launched or maintained and because we do not know anyone it has directly affected we rarely acknowledge there is anything happening at all. That is true for this illness, as it is true for our multiple trillion dollar war on terror.
With this election, we have an historic chance to alter the course of our - sordid, recent - history.
I listened to a podcast this morning about a young, Black, gay, Democratic Socialist male who, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, unseated a Democratic incumbent who probably was no longer taking his role as public servant seriously. AOC had inspired him to run and now she is mentoring him. He will be the first of that description to ever have a seat in the House of Representatives.
If we - progressives, liberals, social progressives, Never Tr*mpers - can achieve the tsunami of blue voters we so long for, we could sweep every branch of government and then immediately get to work rectifying more than 50 years of political malfeasance.
We could expand the Supreme Court. That is within Congress’ power.
We could eliminate the Electoral College.
We could add DC as a state, as well as Puerto Rico.
We could demilitarize the police.
We could undo the last four years.
And we will do it by running rough shod on the remaining Republicans and every corporatist Democrat. It won’t be handed to us. We will have to be - as I have been saying for months now - active, engaged citizens.
Democracy doesn’t only die in darkness. It dies when it’s citizens no longer participate.