It’s hard to find a political slogan that hasn’t been used before. Fifty years ago, Richard Nixon’s was, “This time, vote like your whole world depended on it.”
It was a good slogan, and in fact, enough people did vote for Nixon to give him a narrow victory. Less than six years later, some of those people had come to believe that the world needed Nixon tossed out of office, and they helped pressure him to resign.
Well, this time you need to vote, because our whole world really does depend on it — or at least the survival of democracy in America. Let’s face facts: Donald Trump is not like any President we have ever seen before. He is a reckless demagogue who knows everything about campaigning and next to nothing about governing.
Nor does he know, or care, about this nation’s history and traditions, about the Constitution, about what this nation is supposed to stand for, or common human decency.
He appears to have virtually no compassion for his fellow human beings, no grasp of diplomacy, of the delicate world order he inherited, and the perhaps even more delicate world economy, a network of created by decades of careful negotiations.
This is not to say that things or treaties can’t be improved. But a hysterical know-nothing beating on a piano with a club is not about to give us a better interpretation of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.
We now have an administration which finds stirring up racism natural, and a President who, without any justification, has called a black candidate for governor a thief.
A President who shows no respect for the truth. According to fact-checkers for the Washington Post, Donald Trump has been telling an average of 30 lies a day over the last seven weeks. All politicians, even the best of them, shade the truth some, especially during an election campaign. But what Trump has been doing is not of the same category.
Curiously, he isn’t bragging much about the good economy. Instead, he has been vilifying Democrats in the most outrageous terms, calling them traitors and saying they want to open the nation’s borders to dangerous and diseased illegal aliens.
He has misused our military for political reasons, sending thousands of soldiers to our southern border, allegedly to prevent members of a ragtag “caravan” from getting into this nation.
His own military estimates that they are weeks away and no more than a few hundred are likely to make it to the border. But Trump couldn’t care less about the facts.
This is, by the way, a President who has tried twice now to eliminate all funding to restore the Great Lakes. We need people to oppose him who have a positive vision for the future, But first, we need to restore balance and decency to our political system.
Forget party labels.
If you think fairness counts, if you think we have too much economic inequality in this nation, vote. If you think we owe it to ourselves to protect our environment and make it possible for our children to get a decent education, vote.
If you think we owe something to Viola Liuzzo and Medgar Evers and the many martyrs who died so we could all have the right to cast a ballot, vote.
Because if you don’t vote, you are still voting in a way: You are showing you don’t care enough to protest what they are doing to you. You have a chance to show how you feel today.
Use it.
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