A Letter to Trump Supporters After the AP called the election for Biden

 Trump supporters, please. Let me put your mind at ease about a Biden/Harris presidency.

 You don't make $400,000 a year so your taxes won't increase.

 Oil prices might go up a bit, but that money will be invested in renewable resources so maybe my grandchildren will still have planet to live on when they're my age.

 There isn’t going to be a flood of immigrants coming to take your jobs (immigrants do everything from picking your strawberries to operating on your duodenal ulcers- our strength has ALWAYS been our immigrants), but the Dreamers who have contributed so much to this country will finally be able to say, “I’m a United States citizen!!"

 Education will not suffer. In fact, more monies will be appropriated for public education and hopefully that money will be divided fairly so that majority minority Title I schools can have actual working a/c, new text books, band equipment, computer technology, and after school programs.

And your health insurance? Please. If you're paying $600.00 or more a month for private health insurance, how is paying the same amount through an exchange so EVERYONE can have health care going to hurt you? It won’t, and costs and will go down. The only ones that universal healthcare will hurt is YOUR private health insurance company and MY private health insurance company who are helping to drive up costs as I type this. They're the ones lobbying HARD against a healthcare exchange for all. They know their profits will shrink. Healthcare should NEVER be tied to profits.

 And then there’s the word “Socialism.” Settle down, it won’t bite you. You’re so scared of the boogeyman word "socialism" that you fail to look at the way socialism impacts your daily life for the better: 

 Public roads and highways

Law enforcement

Public libraries

Public schools

Social security

Medicare

Earned Income Tax Credit

Section 8 Housing

Housing for Persons with Disabilities (HUD)

Worker protection laws, including child labor laws

Fire departments

Pell Grants

Public water

Job Corps

Family Planning

Legal Aid Services

Headstart

The electricity that comes into rural homes

The Hoover Dam

National Parks

The military

Garbage pickup

Public transportation

 So, sniff up your tears and calm the fuck down. You’re going to be okay. I’m going to be okay.  But you know who will throw a temper tantrum? The uber wealthy in this country (like Zuckerberg, Bezos, the Walmart family, and 50 Cent), that for some insane reason you keep defending.  The tax increase is not going to hurt them except they might not be able to buy a fifth extra mansion or another yacht. Their turn is over. They've reaped disproportionate profits while the lower and middle class have lost substantial ground. It's time that the lower class and the middle class - the backbone of this country -have policies enacted to help THEM. 

 And that science stuff? It’s real. I don’t care if you read some Facebook post about how a virus was made in a lab and unleashed upon an unsuspecting world (it wasn’t)  or watched a YouTube made by some dubiously educated doctor saying masks cause illness (they don’t).  I’M listening to the doctors who have spent their lives furthering their education and who have dedicated years to gaining knowledge through actual research: doctors who have published in prestigious medical journals and have won numerous awards in their fields, doctors who have worked in their fields, who have started at point A to get to Point R and not worked backwards from Point R to prove Point A (because that’s not how science works). 

Oh, yeah, and Climate Change? That shit is real too and human actions have sped it up exponentially.

 Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon who I referred to earlier, saw his wealth rise by $48 BILLION dollars during the pandemic, a sum that is unfathomable to most people. Meanwhile in a Center for Budget and Policy Priorities report, that was updated on November 2, 2020, it was found that due to Covid-19, 1 in 7 adults with children lacked sufficient food in the last seven days. Nearly 1 in 6 renters are not caught up on their rent and are risking homelessness. This is the greatest nation on earth?

 Meanwhile, the virus continues to ravage not only our economy but our citizens and our country. The virus spreads unchecked under a current president who has decided to effectively ignore the virus. Biden won’t ignore it.  His virus task force (who by the way believes in science) will hit the ground running on day one.

 The rich are growing vastly richer and average Americans are sliding into poverty at dizzying rates. The virus is running unchecked. Unemployment is mounting. The disparities in income have become a huge chasm. We have to start building bridges over that chasm or we will collapse into that oblivion.

Joe can start the bridge building process. WE can start that process, but it’s going to take everyone being informed about what is really going on. Read books. For God’s sake, just read some freaking books.

 I recommend the following list as a jumping off point:

 Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich

 The Working Poor: Invisible in America by David K. Shipler,

 The American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take it Back by Elisabeth Rosenthal

 The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America’s Broken Education System and How to Fix It by Natalie Wexler

 Hand to Mouth; Living in Bootstrap America by Linda Tirado

 White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin Diangelo

 The Warmth of Other Suns:  The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson

Dark Money by Jan Mayer

With Biden as president, you won't be subjected to late night rage tweeting, watching a president suck up to dictators, sitting by as a president makes millions of personal dollars off taxpayers, hearing a president refer to people with childish schoolyard nicknames, or being slammed with headlines where a president has blasted an allied foreign head of state out of pettiness. 

The wealthy will pay their fair share, minimum wage increases will mean you don't have to scrape to buy food or get a new pair of glasses, and renewable energy sources will mean JOBS!  Our national forests and parks and wildlife, the shining diamonds of our country, will again be protected.

 So, how's that looking for you? 

Turn off Fox News and OAN and start reading/listening to award winning journalism like Associated Press and Reuters. Facebook memes aren't news. Twitter isn't news. Learn to practice discernment. Learn to shift the bullshit from the truth, even if you don't like the truth. What’s the old saying? The truth shall set you free. However, you must first be willing to look at the truth and not flinch. Do you have the courage to do that?

I’m betting on America. Are you? 

We're still here, baby!!

 

 

Why I Vote. Tuesday, Nov 3 , 2020 1:56 p.m

 

One June 10, 1963, President John F. Kennedy signed into law The Equal Pay Act of 1963. I was almost five months old.

 

On August 28, when I was one year and seven months old, The March on Washington occurred with the keynote speaker, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. giving his now famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

 

I was one year and ten months old when President Kennedy was killed in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

 

 I was three years old when in 1965, President Johnson signed The Voting Rights Act that halted efforts to keep minorities from voting. That same year the Supreme Court ruled on Griswold v. Connecticut, that struck down a law restricting access to contraception for married couples.

 

In 1967, when I was five-years-old, President Johnson amended Executive Order 11246, which dealt with affirmative action, to include sex discrimination on the list of prohibited employment discrimination.

 

 On April 4, 1968 Rev Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in Memphis at The Lorraine Hotel.

 

On June 28, 1968 when police tried to arrest gay patrons in New York City at the Stonewall Inn for simply being gay, the patrons rioted for three days.

 

In late summer 1968 I came to Georgia school for first grade while my dad went to Vietnam. I saw school and other social racial segregations for the first time in my life.

 

On November 22, 1971 when I was nine-years-old, the Supreme Court case Reed v. Reed declared sex discrimination a violation of the 14th Amendment.

 

When I was ten-years old in 1972, the senate approved the Equal Rights Amendment and it was sent to the states for ratification (to this day, it has not passed). That same year, the American Psychiatric Association finally agreed to remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders.

 

In 1973 the Supreme Court ruled on Roe Vs Wade, giving women, for the first time, the legal right to reproductive choice. I was eleven-years-old.

 

I was a senior in high school on October 14, 1979, when 75,000 people descended on Washington for a National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights.

 

In 1980, the year I graduated high school, Paula Hawkins of Florida, a Republican, became the first woman to be elected to the U.S. Senate without following her husband or father in the job.

When I was nineteen-years-old in 1981, the first woman Supreme Court Justice was confirmed. 

On June 26, 2015, when I was fifty-three years old, the United States Supreme Court ruled same sex marriage legal in all 50 states.

 

In 2017 when I was fifty-five-years-old, thousands of immigrant children, including infants, were separated from their parents by our government. To date, over 500 children have not been reunited with their families.  

 

I was fifty-eight-years-old when George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were murdered by law enforcement officers.

I was fifty-eight-years-old when 231,477 Americans had been reported dead from Covid-19, a virus that our leadership failed to address. 

 

I vote so that we might protect the rights that women, blacks, and the LGBTQ community have fought so hard to obtain.

I vote for all Americans no matter the race, creed, age, sexual orientation, sexual identity, or religion.

I vote so that all Americans will have equal protection under the law.

I vote on the right side of history.

 I vote for unity and not division.

I vote for social justice.

I vote so that all Americans might have healthcare.

I vote so that education is equally funded for every child.

 

I vote Joe Biden because our country will not survive another four years of Donald J. Trump. We are standing on the precipice. This is our moment.

See you on the other side.