Brianland

With the recent stacking of the Supreme Court and overturning of Roe vs. Wade and gun protections in New York, I was reminded that these events all happened because just enough people of the left spent the 2016 general election campaign trashing Hillary Clinton and either not voting or voting third party that an amoral monster was able to actually become the president of the United States.

Here are some paragraphs from the “2020” chapter of my book Blissfully Ravaged in Democracy that the world would be a better place if more people had internalized in 2016.

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Vote  Blue  No  Matter  Who

What beautiful poetry to start the year.  Some put it — “Any blue will do,” . . . or “Vote blue, do not renew” — but however you wanna rhyme it, it’s music to our years.

For me, picking a candidate during the primary is like choosing something on a menu at a great restaurant.  You’re gonna like whatever you order.  And there’s no sense in getting upset about a tablemate making a different choice.

Of the 26 candidates who ran for the Democratic nomination, I initially went for Elizabeth Warren.  Forgetting about playing pundit and trying to game out who could slay the Trumpenstein monster — when I just closed my eyes and pictured who I’d most like to see behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office cleaning up this mess, it was Gets Thing Done Warren.  She’s articulate and energetic and smart and I’ve loved her in every interview I’d ever seen her do over many years, going back long before she ran for the Senate.  She took on the predatory lending of the big banks, which I think is the worst mass crime committed in America in my lifetime — these soulless unregulated profiteer banks conning poor people into mortgages they knew they couldn’t maintain just so they could take their homes for their own profit and ruin millions of families lives and dreams forever.   I wanted all those bastards in jail for life — and so did this feisty kick-ass woman.

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It’s so much easier to learn so much more about every candidate and every issue in 2020 than it ever has been in history — and you don’t even have to crack a book.  But I’m glad you did this one.  🙂  No candidate is perfect just like no human is perfect.  The history books paint beautiful portraits of JFK and Lincoln and Jefferson . . . but that was before every news article and opinion piece ever printed about them was instantly accessible on a screen in your hand.

People talk about how Facebook and Twitter are such big factors in the election, but I find myself using YouTube more.  You can type in any candidate’s name, and with its Filter / Upload Date option, see what they’ve been up to in the “Last hour” or “Today” or “This week” or whatever.  You can see them actually talking a few minutes ago, not just some meme or 280 character postcard or some basement blogger’s rant.

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If we on the left continue to factionalize and fight within our family rather than uniting and accepting that there can be Catholics and atheists within the same collective, Bernie supporters and Biden supporters, Michael Bloombergs and Tulsi Gabbards, DNC loyalists and independents — if we don’t see ourselves as all part of the same expansive open inclusive assemblage of left-leaning Americans, we are doomed to a future, both immediate and long-term, of an extremist right-wing minority dominating the laws imposed upon us all.

If you think trump’s good for the country, and the 2016 election results were just fine, and the senate impeachment trial was handled responsibly, and Brett Kavanaugh is the kind of person you want to see on the Supreme Court, then by all means keep tearing down anyone on the left that you disagree with.  But if you’d like to change the sinking Titanic direction of this great country, it might be an idea to remember where the problem lies and who your teammates are, no matter the specific shade of blue of the jersey they’re wearing.

We need as many people rowing towards the future as we can get.

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You can order a copy of Blissfully Ravaged In Democracy here.

You can check reviews and performances from the book here.

Or here’s The Beat Museum’s Jerry Cimino’s introduction in the book.

Or here’s a complete list of political and other Adventures that appear in my various books.

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by Brian Hassett

karmacoupon@gmail.com   —  BrianHassett.com

Or here’s my Facebook page if you wanna join in there —

https://www.facebook.com/Brian.Hassett.Canada