Lesser Evil 2020

Unfinished ramblings:

After a year of pandemic including a spring and summer of quarantine, plus the weirdest most anticlimactic democratic primary ever, followed by freakish conventions of the two major parties, the threat of the end of feasibility of liberal influence on the supreme court for potentially decades to come, anxiety and aspersions cast on the voting process by the president himself, culminating in the recklessness and indifference of a president to a disease that his inaction has permitted to slay nearly a quarter million of his citizens and made him and his inner circle sick in a way that he seems determined to empower him, I think I have reached a sputtering stage, so this could be a month for extremely light posting, but before I ramp down, I wanted to take a moment to make an endorsement for the November presidential election.  (as long as you don't hold me to it.)

I have voted in 10 presidential elections since I first reached the age of suffrage.   I voted in 4 primaries until I went independent before Bill Clinton's second term in a state that has closed primaries, and did not re-declare as a democrat until 2016 (so I could vote for Bernie Sanders). My primary choice has never won.  As for the General Election, I'm batting .400. So I don't expect to win this time either. 

One party is actively engaged in hurting people.  The other's harm infliction is a bit less active.  One party is tromping in oversized clodhoppers down the path stomping on every ant, snake, ladybug, toad, mouse,  immigrant, poor person and child it sees.  The other is tromping more seriously, eyes straight ahead on the path of righteousness.  If it also kills everything in its wake, it's unfortunate but its intentions were good. (There are other parties whose existence seems to be just therapeutic for those who require their vote to balm them-- their harm to everything in their path is more indirect.)

Does it matter who the president is?  I've never heard a convincing argument that it doesn't, and yet it is true, of the two parties who win, one is actively trying to hurt you, the other considers your pain collateral damage toward a goal toward which it is pushing that even if it is reached you will never benefit from, but the hurt feels the same. 

If you voted for Bernie Sanders in the primary (but not if you are Bernie Sanders), you may balk at the notion of voting for the lesser evil.  If you keep voting for the lesser evil, your thinking may be, you are still voting for evil.  You are still helping the slide to the right; that is, to the side of Evil.  But the reality is, if you do not vote for the lesser evil, you will surely get the greater evil.  Vote for lesser evil.  If you live in a safe state and expect those in swing states to do the dirty work for you, vote in solidarity with them.  No matter what happens at the end of the day, come January, roll up your sleeves and get to work.    It will be easier with less evil in the air.  With the resistance retired, the work will be more productive.

Words by E.J. Dempsey (as W.R. Winspear); Art by Claude Marquet (1916)