I Can’t Wait For November 7th
For two years now, I’ve been told by everyone that I need to get excited to vote, because, honestly? I never really have been before. My home state of West Virginia was always so reliably conservative and Republican-leaning that I just never paid much mind to politics. Sure, I watched with interest at the election of America’s first African American president. I chuckled to myself of the somewhat goofy, ineffectual (but still backwards and corrupt) befuddlement of George W. Bush. But I never really cared about it. The election of Congressional members (let alone judges and school board members and sheriffs) just seemed too miniscule to me. Preoccupied with college and my social life, politics and voting was just too low on my list. Well, not anymore. Congratulations to every civic-minded person that has attempted to rile me up about the politics of America. It worked. I’m hooked. Consider me appropriately “riled”.
However, political burn-out is real, and I’m as thoroughly cooked as one of Trump’s well-done steaks served with ketchup (blech). For two years now, the sheer monumental importance of November 6th’s mid-term elections has been a distant focal-point on the horizon of the salvage of America. As soon as Trump was elected, all eyes seemed to immediately shoot to their calendars, and the count-down clock began. And I, for one, simply can’t take much more of it.
I’m ready for it to be over with. These last few days before the tallies are counted and the extent of voter enthusiasm (or apathy) to rebuke (or embrace) the last two year’s political events is finally revealed. Nonetheless, like a coach who’s practiced his squad’s game-plan down to every eventuality, yet still finds himself with hours to kill before the actual tip-off, the final days of November before the mid-terms have seemed to slow to a glacial pace.
Burdened with political fatigue, I’ve resigned myself to attempt to block-out any political news or happenings of these last few days. I’ve check and re-checked my voter status (which for everyone in Georgia, Texas, Ohio, and really every state, apparently necessitates a daily inspection), I’ve found my local polling place, I’ve researched who’s running and what issues are up for my consideration. So what else is there?
It remains unfathomable to me that anyone is America is undecided regarding their vote right now. A by-product of our 24-hours news cycle and a shameless self-promoter in the White House means that few could have escaped hearing about at least some of the recent political happenings of the past two years. Whether this information is coming from Josephine Goebbels (Sarah Huckabee-Sanders), the Ministry of Propaganda (“Fox & Friends”), CNN, NBC, Rachel Maddow, Jake Tapper, etc. is, at this point, immaterial. The point is you should have an opinion either way. Either you’re fine with putting helpless children in cages or you’re not. Either you’re fine voting for a party that are running honest-to-God Neo Nazis and White Supremacists, or you’re not. Either you’re fine with voting for the party of nepotism, corruption, lies, fraud, misogyny, racism, hatred, bigotry, and xenophobia (i.e. the Republican Party for anyone wondering), or, again, you’re not. It really is that simple.
Donald Trump, who famously claimed that he would be too busy at the White House to vacation, but has golfed, in one half-term, more than any other president in history has notably been claiming at his many ego-boosting rallies guised as campaign support, that a vote for Republican Candidate “X” is really a vote for him. And, as much as it pains me to say it, he’s right. Like it or not, Trump is the head of the Republican Party. So anything else than an outright rebuke of his policies by any Republican running for office amounts to a tacit (or enthusiastic) acceptance and adoption of Trump’s policies as their own.
While I generally deride the use of hyperbole in politics, if there was ever a time for it, it’s the 2018 mid-terms. In my opinion, anything short of the wholesale decimation of Republicans by a Blue Wave on Tuesday will signal the end of the American Democratic experiment. Never before has a political party been so blatantly corrupt and so un-abashedly self-interested as those of 2018’s crop of Republican candidates. From gigantic conflicts of interest such as a Secretary of State propagating fraud to the tune of 300,000+ voters purged from state registries in an election in which he is simultaneously a candidate and executor, to glaring voter suppression in Ohio that has caused a judge to order an edict that purged voters be allowed to express their opinions at the ballot-box . These are just two of myriad corrupt and fraudulent attempts by the GOP to effectively dismantle the fundamental building-blocks of the American democracy: the right to vote. A continued Republican Congress means further gerrymandering during the 2020 census, and that, folks, will be the ball-game.
In effect, we should be thanking Republicans for being so forthright about their hypocrisy and being do brazen regarding their corruption, as it has removed the grey from the black and white future of America. This is it; the fork in the road from which I fear there is no return. The dye of the American future has been cast. Early voters and those that have no choice but to endure the days until November 6th can do little but mark the passage of time. That’s why I can’t wait for my 5:00 AM alarm on November 7th. Because at least I/we/ and the world will know. One way or another America will awake to a changed landscape on November 7th, and I certainly hope it has changed for the better.
jaycockblog 