The truth is, I hesitated to post about the election. Things are so very polarized, and it’s so important to me that this space remain one in which people feel respected, considered, and loved.
And as much as I fear anyone ever taking something I say personally or not the way I meant it (and I fear it a lot, like...had months of anxiety in 2018 because of it “a lot”), even stronger than the fear is a feeling in my gut that I want to make my stance in this race known. Not because I’m deluded enough to believe that anybody is waiting on pins and needles, but because when I started blogging a million years ago on a LiveJournal (shoutout to my homies from 2005 who also had a lot of feelings!), it was just a collection of my thoughts. For whatever else this blog has turned into, that’s still what it is.
This little piece isn’t meant to convince you, or shame you if you don’t agree with me - if you’ve read my blog long enough, you (hopefully) know that that’s not my style. So not my style, in fact, that last week I published this piece to help you make your own decision regardless of my own biases - I believe in informed, smart voting, no matter what the vote being cast reflects. Instead, it’s simply to tell you what’s going on in my head and heart.
So here’s what I think.
When Donald Trump was elected in 2016, I wrote this piece. I try to come from a place of “calm now, panic later if and when we actually should.” It bothers me when people panic, and In response to the massive panic that took place after Trump’s election, I found myself desperately searching for steadiness and pragmatism.
The piece is called “It’s Going To Be Okay, But First:” and was filled with data, and mourning, but ultimately, with hope.
The thing is, as pragmatic a non-panicked person as I try to be, it was not okay. Not okay for so many people and in so many ways.
And I don’t say that because “my team” lost the 2016 election. I’m perfectly used to losing.
I’m an Auburn fan.
It’s because the man who won the election seems devoid of a moral compass, or compassion, or the other things that we hold as imperatives for our role models.
Though Maya Angelou taught us the old chestnut, “When people show you who they are, believe them,” I still manage to find myself shocked and devastated by his lack of integrity or willingness to lead with anything that resembles dignity, or humility. There are a few lessons that my dad taught me growing up which I wrote down in a notebook and never forgot. One of them is, “Good leaders take the blame and share the credit.” I can’t remember a time that President Trump has taken the heat for making a mistake, or that he’s deflected praise (even if well-earned) to another deserving person.
All politicians are desperate to be loved, and all of them say things that are flat out wrong or stupid every now and again. Though I loved President Obama, he made mistakes. Everyone does. Unless you’re looking to hate someone, we can all offer a bit of grace to each other in those moments. But instead of an occasional misstep or gaffe, we’ve been living for the last four years with a President who actively mis-leads the American public. Who says things that are not true, even while he knows they’re not true as he’s saying them. Can we pause and just sit with that for a moment? Because if you’re like me, you’ve had to compartmentalize that truth in order to keep your head above water and believe that better times were ahead. The idea that I haven’t watched more than a handful of Presidential addresses, press conferences, State of the Unions...all because I knew I couldn’t trust what I was hearing, from the President of the United States - that feels heavy and awful to me.
In the midst of all those other thoughts, as I sat down to write this, I found myself thinking mostly about the unpredictability of life.
If the insane, Michael Bay-worthy mess that is 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that nothing is certain. Life can change in a snap. When Mac was born in December of 2017, our families poured into the hospital room, armed with hot chocolate and flowers. When Rosie was born at the height of the first wave in April 2020, we introduced her to our parents over Facetime.
Life is very precious, and though we’re resilient as hell, very fragile. And when I thought about the issues surrounding this and all elections, the term “pro-life” began to form new meaning.
I believe in the sanctity of human and animal life. I try my very best to catch and release bugs in my house. Sometimes, I admit, they do get squished in the transfer from trapped under a glass to the yard - but the intention is there. On my best days, I’m a vegetarian, although sometimes a cheeseburger tempts me away from that position.
But there are some positions on which I never waver.
I am, and have always been, anti-capital punishment and anti-war. I don’t think that committing a crime means your life is less valuable; the religion I subscribe to does not teach that. I believe that children are sacred, precious miracles and deserve to be born into a world that is ready to provide basic needs for them, rather than born for the sake of upholding an obligation, then abandoned by an administration who does not believe housing is a human right. I believe in the sacredness of a mother’s life, and that while she is pregnant, she deserves affordable healthcare and nutrition. I believe in the sacredness of the lives of Black women, who are disproportionately sick and dying in childbirth because of statistically proven systemic racism and pre-existing conditions that this administration seeks to punish.
I am “pro-life” when it comes to poor people who have been losing their homes, whose children are hungry because this administration put ego before science and failed to save them. I think the lives of immigrant families and children are just as important as my own, and I find the practice of separating children from their parents, allowing them to get sick and die in isolation from their caretakers to be not only monstrous and horrific, but grieving to the heart of the God who sees all life as having been created on a singular and pristinely valuable plane. I am pro-life when Black men and women killed by people whose job title is “law enforcement.” I am pro-200,000+ lives lost in this pandemic, an unknowable number of which may have been spared had we simply stuck to a plan and listened to people who’ve made it their life’s work to know exactly how to respond in just such a situation.
I support the lives of children in our public education system, one of whom once asked me, “Can you get pregnant from oral sex?” because the system is failing them to the degree that they have no sex education and therefore are some of the people we’re hypothetically talking about when we discuss abortion in the abstract. I believe that the lives of women everywhere should be held up as heroic, hard-working, beautiful and strong instead of demeaned by crude language and back-room smirks, not because they’re someone’s daughter, sister, or wife, but because they are a person unto themselves. I am pro-human, animal, and plant life, destroyed by a callous disrespect for the wonders of the planet.
And while I am personally pro-life in the traditional sense of that phrase, in that had I gotten pregnant prior to getting married, I would’ve had that baby, I also will never vote to restrict women’s access to safe, legal abortions. Women will have abortions whether or not they’re legal, and the reasons are wildly varied. I’m not a doctor, and I’ll never understand the position of a woman seeking an abortion because I’ve never lived it. And because I’ve never lived it, all I can do is vote so that medical professionals have the latitude they need to give women a service they know how to advise about and provide, to offer the necessary mental health support, and make birth control affordable.
Abortion can be terribly upsetting to me, as it can, I imagine, for most mothers to. I feel a lump forming in my throat as I sit here typing these words because of just how potentially devastating, personal, and tender the innumerable circumstances are where an abortion is the outcome. It is complicated. But it isn’t the only thing that matters to me.
There is no perfect candidate, no perfect person. And still, having gone on record four years ago hoping against hope that it would all shake out in the end - hoping for Donald Trump’s success and wishing him well (because what’s the alternative?), I think there is such a thing as an unacceptable answer, even when given a choice.
When we’re asked as a country, “Who are you?” we tend to answer in shouts, most of them directed at people who don’t align with us. What if, instead, we answered in whispers in our own hearts; what if we heard “you” in the singular rather than the plural? The voting booth is a private place, and maybe we could also think of it as a holy one - a confessional of sorts. What if we attenuated the scale of our response to that question, “Who are you?” to be just big enough for one ballot, for one conscience?
(And while we’re talking about religion: I am not confused about whether Donald Trump represents the values of radical love, caretaking, humility, service, inclusion, and justice that are exemplified in my religious tradition by an underdog from Nazareth who was born to a poor, brown, teenage single mother: he does not. I will not allow him to pander to me as a Christian person by posing with a Bible or pretending that being “pro-life” is the same as loving God. Here, he has shown me who he is, and I believe him.)
Regardless of party or precedent, I will always vote for compassion over fear-mongering, for transparency over hubris, for empathy over ego, for softness over hardness.
Two weeks ago, I proudly cast my vote for a Biden/Harris administration.