If you haven’t done so already, please vote.This day has never felt so portentous before.I’ve been voting since the 1980s and we’ve had some real unsavory choices in some past years.Never had we had a monstrous incumbent set on destroying the very nation that made him what he is.Those who don’t, or won’t read the facts haven’t learned what’s obvious even to lifelong Republicans I know—Trump cares only for himself.His family confirms it.His policies, such as they are, show it.He provides lip service to anti-abortion while using stem cells from fetuses to cure his own case of Covid-19 that he caught only by ignoring the science that tells us masks and distancing are necessary.Even as our infection rates pass what they’ve ever been before, he fiddles while America burns.
Some of us have noticed a profound quiet for the past week or so.It’s like the country’s running a low-grade fever.Republicans have been attempting to prevent people from voting, wanting a country more like them, mean and unforgiving, that they can call “Christian.”To me this feels like 9-11 did, only we have known the plot all along and have been too stunned to do anything about it.Democracies are founded on the principle of the choice of the electorate.The only way that we can make that choice known is to vote.It’s the only way left to be a patriot.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was faced with a similar situation in his native Germany.An evangelical Christian, he didn’t acquiesce to Hitler, glorying in the rush of power.He wrote that when a madman is driving the wheel must be wrenched from his hands.Bonhoeffer was hanged by the Nazis he tried to displace, but his spiritual eyesight was clear.Faith can blind believers to the truth.We’ve seen this happen time and time and time again.Instead of condemning we need to help them since they cannot help themselves.This is the truest form of what Jesus stood for.Read the gospels if you doubt.This year the decision isn’t for Democrat or Republican, it’s for clear-eyed assessment or self-adoring narcissism.If a mirror’s held too close, we can’t see what’s truly reflected.We must vote today to show what we want America to be.The eyes of both the past and the future are upon us.How will we want them to be remembered?