If you have not already voted, I’d like to offer a bit of advice. I know who you should vote for on Tuesday. If you ever read The Activist you know by now that opinions are not in short supply, and I’ve never been shy about offering you mine.
Actually, because we are a 501c3 nonprofit, I’m not allowed to tell you for which candidate you should vote, and the truth is I wouldn’t anyway. What I do want you to do on Tuesday, though, is vote FOR hope and AGAINST fear. Vote for the candidates that offer you hope for the future—your future and the future of this country.
Since September 11, 2001, politicians of both parties have stooped far too often to using fear in order to manipulate people. The congress has been manipulated consistently into reducing civil liberties, empowering the executive branch, writing blank checks to the military industrial complex, and authorizing unending wars that have made us no safer. Fear is a terrible policy maker, and it has distorted our country’s values and vision. BOTH presidential candidates have spoken out against America using torture, but the current management in Washington has used fear to mute any outrage.
Our economy, security, health and welfare will not be served by us voting our fears. Refuse to be outFoxed any more. My parents in South Georgia only watch Fox News, and they are terrified for the future. They live in a town so small that it is likely the 1,999,999,999th target on the list of global terrorist targets, yet they are afraid of terrorists. My father doesn’t want to fly, though he is 44,000 times more likely to be killed driving to the local Walmart.
When you go to the polls on Tuesday, vote AGAINST the candidates most likely to try to use fear to manipulate people. If that is all they have to offer then they are trying to hide the truth. If someone has offered you hope they obviously have somewhere they wish to lead us. They may or may not be correct, but at least they are not using fear to perform sleight-of-hand to distract and manipulate you.
In this election, let’s vote for hope, and then let’s invest our own energy into making those hopes and dreams come true. The situation is bad, but not nearly as bad as situations this country has faced in the past. In times like these, leaders helped us find our way through not by making us afraid, but by offering us hope; not by dividing us, but by helping us come together. My prayer is that this election will be an utter repudiation of the politics of fear and smear, of division and cynicism. The day after the election, we will face the same problems we do today, but my prayer is that, on that day, we will face those problems together and with hope.
THIS SATURDAY NIGHT
