Cassandra, Elections, Immoral Values, JOEY B SHARK, Political Crack

The 2024 Election Isn’t About You. It’s About Us.

Joe Biden announced his expected run for re-election on Tuesday morning with the release of a 3 minute video that begins with scenes from the January 6 insurrection and then moves into a defense of personal freedom and democracy:

There was a lot of grumbling after Biden’s announcement was released from people who are unenthusiastic about voting for him again. The media ran a bunch of stories Tuesday morning about a NBC poll that showed most Republicans and Democrats don’t want Biden to run again. None of that matters because what the poll doesn’t show is that most of those Democrats, and some of those Republicans, will in fact vote for Biden if it’s a Biden/Trump rematch.

As for those people who say they won’t vote for Biden again, I ask them to think about the people that the Republicans want to hurt:

Women. 

There’s no chance that abortion will survive in any form if the GOP takes Congress and the White House n 2024. And if you don’t think this affects you because you’re not a woman, think about the women in your lives—if not your sisters or your daughters, then your nieces or your friends (and their daughters), women who have miscarriages, vulnerable women, women who just don’t want a child. It’s not about you–it’s about us.

LGBTQ people.

We’ve already seen the GOP effort to attack LGBTQ rights in the sad, and non-orthodox, movement of Christian extremists to claim that their religious beliefs preclude them from having to help and respect the people that the Jesus they claim to worship would have had solidarity with. The legal efforts to roll back LGBTQ civil rights are infuriating, but they are nothing compared to the ongoing open attacks on trans people, and especially trans women. It’s not about you—it’s about us.

BiPOC people.

It’s not about affirmative action. It’s about not letting Republicans erase the history of Black Americans from our collective history. See, if there’s no record of what happened to Black Americans—slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, redlining, placing interstate highways in thriving urban Black neighborhoods in order to destroy them, the gains of the Civil Rights Movement and those who were martyred for it, etc.—then none of it happened.

And it that erasure won’t be limited to Black people, either. It will extend to other minority groups, and then to disabled people and elderly people. It’s not about you—it’s about us.

Maybe you think that being cisgender or heterosexual or white or being a Republican will keep you safe when the authoritarians ascend. Well, none of those things will. The fascists will just come for you last.

Get over yourself and remember it’s not just about you.

R.I.P. Harry Belafonte.