If it wasn’t clear before – and it should have been – the stark and ugly contrast between the Republican National Convention and the Democratic National Convention, held over the last two weeks, made the choice as clear as clear could possibly be. This is an election that is as serious as your life, if the quality of your life – and that of your friends and family –means anything to you at all.
To those on the left who continue to insist, after everything we have seen, that this is nothing more than a choice between two wealthy and powerful white people who will do nothing more than maintain the status quo, you are either disingenuous, reckless, or woefully uninformed on the issues that matter most to this country right now. And more specifically to our Michigan Chronicle readership, the issues that matter most to black people. Because as dissatisfied as some of us may be with politics as usual and the Democratic Party, voting for a third party candidate – or staying away from the polls altogether – will do absolutely nothing to address such critical issues as police brutality, voter disenfranchisement, and gun violence. Let alone employment, education, and the need for an economic policy that addresses the deterioration of so many urban areas.
Do I know Hillary Clinton will solve all of these issues? Of course not. But I do know she has pledged to put her back into it and do all that she can. And she can do a lot. Anybody who knows how to use Google can check for themselves what she has said she will do, and then check what she has already done throughout her career. Claiming that Hillary is only courting the black vote as a means of political expediency need to once again check the other guy for comparison. Then watch the tape of what happened to more than one black protester – and white – who had the nerve to show up to a Trump rally and protest.
Did Clinton pull out all the stops to attract black support? Yep. She did. So is that supposed to be a bad thing, especially when the other guy is gleefully endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazis? So far as I know, Trump’s depth of black support extends to Mike Tyson, reality show star Omarosa, who is (hilariously) managing Trump’s minority outreach campaign, and a handful of others. Trump’s response to police brutality is to promise his supporters that he will be the law and order candidate, which is essentially code for promising to support the officially-sanctioned cracking of black skulls without any repercussions for those doing the cracking. Watch and listen to what Trump supporter Rudy Giuliani had to say about Black Lives Matter, and how police brutality in black communities is essentially the fault of black people, and you get the idea.
Right now this is not about political revolution, as appealing as that may be. This is about survival. This is about protecting the gains that President Obama miraculously still managed to achieve in the face of a Republican Congress who hates him. This is about filling that vacant seat on the Supreme Court. This is about not simply protecting Obamacare put expanding it.
This is about recognizing the fact that one of this nation’s two major political parties has been hijacked by a cabal of white nationalists and the mentally unstable, in broad daylight, while far too many of the moderate, ‘sensible’ members of that party stood by silently on the sidelines to watch as everything they thought they stood for was being raped and pillaged. Because, hey, at least they were anti-Obama. Because anyone that represented a threat to Obama’s presidency and legacy was worthy of a sloppy wet kiss from the Republicans, regardless of the danger they posed otherwise.
The standard-bearer of that New Republican Party, America’s Fuehrer-In-Waiting, is now on a path to hijack the White House.
This is about blocking the path to power of a visibly unhinged dictator wannabe who is not only singularly unqualified for office but who doesn’t really care. This is about the difference between someone who wants to use the power of the presidency to actually accomplish something versus someone who is only pursuing the White House as a trophy. Electing Donald Trump to the presidency would be the equivalent of giving your 5-year-old the keys to the family car. With the family still inside. While on I-75. During rush hour.
Don’t just believe – or disbelieve – what I’m saying. Do your research. This is just as important to you as it is to me.
I have voted in every election since I was eligible to vote, which stretches back over every election held during the last 40 years. Didn’t matter if it was an election for city council, school board, mayor, governor, or a presidential election. The same can be said of both my parents, Sebastian and Geneva Owens, and my grandfather, Henry Wardell McNamee (my grandmother, Fannie, died before black people had the right to vote). Matter of fact, pretty much everyone on my side of the family has strongly believed in the importance of voting. Same on my wife’s side.
It’s the way we were all raised.
It’s safe to say that at no time during all those years of voting, all those years of punching ballots and pulling levers behind closed curtains, has there ever been an election more important, or more significant, than this one. The two-time election of President Barack Obama was historic; who would have ever thought we would see the day when a black man with a white mother and an African father would defeat a white male war hero, and then a successful, wealthy white male businessman? And not by small margins, either. Thankfully, Obama rewarded those victories with eight years of remarkable service destined to mark him as one of the greatest American presidents of modern times.
The next president will be historic as well. She will either be the nation’s first female Commander-In-Chief, committed to continuing what Obama started, or he will be the most singularly unqualified presidential nominee of either party, and the single biggest threat to this nation’s well-being since the start of the 20th century.
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