I have the luxury of living in a “safe” state. I’ve tried to imagine how I would vote if I lived in a swing state. Hopefully it will remain conjecture.
What brings me to the keyboard are statements and insinuations that it’s a “privilege” for someone like me to not vote for her and the presumption that it’s ‘to prove a point’ or just plain petulance. I’ll try to explain my problem with that as succinctly as I can:
The ‘privileged’ voter here is being asked to vote with compassion for those likely to be in the cross-hairs of Donald Trump, per his rhetoric and the mood of some of his supporters. That’s fine. The problem is that there is plenty of room for compassion for those likely to be in the cross-hairs of Hillary Clinton, a war hawk and finance servant, just as there is for the potential victims of an unstable divide-and-conquer demagogue.
My vote for her might actually go against my comparative sense of compassion, if it could be measured in human suffering. It’s just that… it’s FUCKING DONALD TRUMP!!
It’s not privilege; it’s not to prove a point. I could probably reread an article on Honduras right now and say, with tears in my eyes, “there’s no fucking way I could ever vote for her!” That’s why the assumptions and implicit shaming piss me off.
The rich and powerful kleptocrats that she works for (Trump too, despite his party platform’s better bs on trade and banks) and unnecessary/endless wars, have made fertile ground in this country for a divide-and-conquer demagogue. The Sound and Fury over this election, from my liberal corner of the world, is all about plugging the growing leaks with more status quo to keep the demagogue at bay, a ‘status quo’ that feeds upon itself and grows, creating more division and disparity. Some real changes are needed to stop this spiral or the next demagogue’s coming, with greater venom and clarity.
There’s also fertile ground for positive change, but the press, the process, the DNC and too many voters were having no part of that and now those shut-out-of-the-process, flipped-off, citizens are being primed for the blame should she lose, a loss made possible by shutting out those citizens!
