I understand that folks are busy with time-consuming and energy-sucking activities like earning a living, getting an education, raising a family, keeping house, and just having some fun here and there. That’s life. And for many years that was my life as well. However, throughout all those years, I still made time to vote. I fully acknowledge that there are more distractions today that make voting more challenging for busy folks. In my early years, a more reliable news media and local election boards made it easier to select candidates and to vote at the polls. Aggressive journalists kept politicians on their toes so that issues were more important than personality. Living in an affluent area, the longest I had to wait in line to cast a ballot was 15 minutes. These days, because California is awesome, I vote by mail for even greater convenience. Other states don’t have it so well. In recent years I started hearing about people standing in line for 9-11 hours in poor urban areas to exercise their right to vote. That’s one way to make it harder to vote. But there are others.
In the pre-Trump era, politicians were far more truthful and less hypocritical because there were scores of journalists ready to expose lies and misdeeds. Candidates or office holders who lied or misbehaved in egregious ways were shamed into apologies or disqualification for office. They either withdrew their candidacy or resigned from office. Most Democrats still do this, but Republicans do not. Since Trump, public shaming no longer works on Republicans. They keep their eyes on the prize that power brings and just wait out any bad press. In addition, they created their own news media outlets to minimize, hide, or simply lie about their misdeeds while actively accusing Democrats of egregious acts. I’ve said repeatedly that Republican accusations of wrongdoing keep turning out to be confessions. But it doesn’t seem to matter. Hypocrisy has become the norm and they use “Christian” forgiveness as a tool to excuse a multitude of their own misbehaviors but deny that same grace when it comes to Democrats. Go figure.
It seems that everyday people are just too busy to care these days. Republican strategists determined that it was advantageous to replace actual journalists with commentators on television and radio and social media to spread misinformation, ignore truth and bad behavior, while stoking unfounded fears and openly enraging their audience against Democrats with baseless claims of stealing an election, communism, open border policies, defunding the police, pedophilia, and child sacrifice in their devil worship. With an older audience groomed to trust the media and people too busy or too ignorant to fact check, they found this to be an effective way to lure people away from Democrats while promoting candidates who will push a White Christian Nationalist agenda that suits the religious values of some, the white supremacist social values of others, and the power and wealth agenda of a few. This is the coalition that was formed to “Make America Great Again” while actually destroying the moral fabric and democratic underpinnings of the Republic.
History has shown that when the majority of people are too busy living their lives to notice a radical political shift against their freedoms, a minority of voters who are hyper-focused, hyper-motivated, and hyper-scared of progressive changes they seize power. The motivated minority are otherwise reasonable people who are fed an overwhelming amount of misinformation, fear mongering, and hateful rhetoric coming from charismatic voices. Those voices have a tyrannical agenda posing as protection from manufactured evils. With the majority busy living their lives, elections swing in a direction that is detrimental to freedom and democracy. The many will suffer at the hand of the few before they realize what has happened.
We’ve already seen the consequences of the 2016 election. We now have a Supreme Court that repeatedly upholds a White Christian Nationalist agenda as the law of the land, overturning Roe v. Wade and poised to overturn Affirmative Action. Next will be gay marriage and transgender rights. White Christian Nationalists are on the ballot in every state, and they are counting on the majority of Americans to be too busy to notice their actual agenda or to even vote. MAGA folks have even taken to voter intimidation in some places. And even the polls can no longer be trusted to accurately predict the outcomes of elections since they screw towards older white Americans who have the time to take them. In 2016 people who were polled were too embarrassed to admit that they were going to vote for Trump and so the polls were misleading. I pray they are again off the mark and that Democrats will be able to win governor races, secretary of state races, and hold both the House and Senate. But without a huge turnout of voters, winning is not certain and I fear what is in store for our nation.
If MAGA Republicans win this election and keep on winning, LGBTQ rights will be rolled back. Not only abortion, but contraceptives will be banned. Social Security and Medicare will be on the chopping block. Clean energy and climate change initiatives will be rolled back. It will be harder to vote for the changes because voting rights will be suppressed. Actual science and history will be subject to religious and ideological changes. Diversity, equity, and inclusion will be replaced by legalized discrimination. Law enforcement will be permanently outgunned by vigilantes and criminals alike. The streets will overflow with the blood of innocent lives. Prisons will explode with dissenters, LGBTQ folks, doctors, and people of color falsely accused and plea-bargained into prison sentences. Americans will die from the lack of clean water and air, increased natural disasters due to climate change, and the inability to afford adequate healthcare. And make no mistake, this country will become a theocracy where vocal professors, musicians, artists, filmmakers, and writers are silenced.
It sounds ridiculous and unbelievable. It sounds too ludicrous to even believe such a society could exist in the U.S., but that is where this nation is headed if the majority of Americans don’t vote in this election and the next. Things will get bad as rights are stripped away by a minority of white religious nationalists who have guns and political power. My greatest fear is that busy people will allow this to happen and then suddenly they won’t be so busy anymore. And then all hell will break loose.