DIMM018: The most important election of your life (again)
I want to talk about the US Presidential Election right now because I am very stressed out about it.
It is the most important election of my life since the last one.
The thing that is so scary for me is that usually there are a lot of news stations and professionals that are pretty confident about what is going to happen. Sometimes we get election night surprises, but in general, everything goes to plan.
The problem right now is that nobody is confident about what's going to happen (Except for the keys to power guy he is insanely confident). And it's scary because I can't even stay in my little internet echochamber bubble and just circlejerk into believing that something is certain here, it's just constant anxiety. All of the polls are razor thin, and really the polls don't matter for anything ever at all.
I hope that on the 6th, we don't even remember what we were scared about, that there was some kind of big blowout for my party, but I find that unlikely.
One reason I'm thinking about this is that I went to a different library today to work, and this one happens to also be a polling center. Now I don't exactly live in a local area that aligns with my political views, and I've been thinking about that while sitting here writing. There are tons of people every day for the next 5 days that are going to come in here, and vote against my right to be a human, less than 100 feet away from me. Granted their vote probably won't count for anything in my state because of the electoral college, it's the action that counts.
To think that I am sitting right next to people that think that I shouldn't exist, that I am somehow faking my entire life, that I am a freak weirdo creepy rounding error social experiment in this election is really disheartening. Thinking that my existence is somehow inherently political. That I should be who I want to be, just not around them. That my right to express my true self in this country should be up in the air. That I should have to prove that I deserve rights like everyone else. That me and a lot of my friends should be stuck wondering if we are going to continue to be our perfect selves, the people we've always wanted to be, or be perpetually prosecuted for petty political points.
And even if who I want to win, wins, they have been weirdly cagey around the issue that I care about the most. Saying that they are going to "follow the law" even though the current laws are killing people like me in some of the more extreme states. Some people have said that they are just doing this to get elected, then will be more progressive when actually in office. And while I feel like that is a good thought, I can equally likely see them just never doing anything and having no accountability for it.
So the choices are either, "you don't deserve to exist", or "maybe you deserve to exist (but we won't tell you until after you vote for us)".
I've done all I can at this point, I voted, got my friends and family to go out and vote, and have talked about voting to the people that like me, I hope that at least one of you is influenced by me to go out and vote. If it needs some kind of incentive, the next video will probably come out faster if a certain person wins. Choose wisely, for me.