Re: Discussion of the 2020 American Federal Election
@204
I'm gay. They want to get rid of gay rights.
I'm blind. We had to protest to protect the ADA in 2018.
I've got a bunch of health problems. They're about to try to get rid of the ACA.
Their platform leaves me in a position where I am unprotected against job discrimination, unable to get health care, and likely without the ADA's protections should they decide to pick that up again. That's the best case scenario. And while people who don't know me get somewhat of a pass, people who *do* know me get much less of one.
The Republican agenda, even without Trump, leaves me in a really bad place. Voting for it, if you actually understand it, means going "nevermind him, my views are more important". But with Trump it also means "I'm also willing to elect this guy who thinks bleach is a cure for viruses" as well.
If you're in the middle of Kansas or something, I get it: you cant help how you're raised, you probably don't see or interact with the sorts of people they're happy to steamroll over. But if you personally know me, yeah, voting for Trump isn't okay by me. The Republicans in general want to erase people like me. They don't want us to die, they'd just rather us go become invisible. Best case of the republican platform is I can't retire because that would mean no health insurance, worst case is I'm okay because I live somewhere super progressive but have to avoid half the country and maybe wherever I am did something at the state level to make up for the ACA.
And my family gets even less of a pass than that because there's two blind children, and they were there for when my health was really bad. They saw me go through hell. Voting for people who are willing to remove health protections from people such as myself after watching me spend literal years in literal agony literally almost every day, that's extra not okay by me, I'm not so willing to forgive it. I've spent the last 6 months worried about Covid because I'm immunocompromized and, again, it's the fault of the Republicans.
Maybe this makes me an elitist bastard by your standards, or something. But I will have to look hard at connections if they vote for Trump, yes. In normal times I wouldn't care so much, but this has gone well past a difference of opinions. I haven't even gotten to the more abstract stuff like the fact that we're probably going to have famine in my lifetime because of climate change. I don't need to. The personal stuff is bad enough, the rest is just icing on that particular cake.
What I want is to be left alone. I think that's what most people like me want at the end of the day. Unfortunately, right now that's not an option. I try to be kind to strangers when it comes to this stuff. As I said above, maybe insert-trump-voter doesn't have the sorts of experiences that would make this personal. Maybe they *don't* know someone whose life gets destroyed by their agenda, should they actually be able to do everything they want. But at some point this stops being politics, in that usual U.S. meaning of "we vote but we don't discuss it and everyone gets along" way. Sometimes, there's people who are targets. Maybe they didn't want to make me a target and that's not their intent at all, but at the end of the day that's what they've done. I've spent 4 years with some level of anxiety, and sometimes fear, as to whether I'm going to wake up tomorrow and they're going to have fucked with something important that I need to have a future. Maybe there's some saint out there who can just forgive people who knowingly perpetuate that.
But you only get to say "but it's politics" in normal times, when the approach of the party in power isn't "let's repeal things without solutions and ignore all the people who needed them". Get me out of the sites of this administration, and fine, we can go back to that. Until then, it's not some score-keeping thing where sometimes I get what I want and sometimes I don't and I should have good sportsmanship about it. There *will* be hard feelings.
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