That vote has been costly. Prize it!

I signed up for another round of canvassing this afternoon to encourage people to vote. I was given a region in Inkster. This suburb of Detroit, or perhaps more accurately of Dearborn, was essentially created by Henry Ford as a place where his black workers could live and commute to his big Rouge River factory complex. So it’s not a very rich place. Once I started walking the neighborhood I encountered two things. First, nearly all the people I talked to had already voted. Second, in many houses I could see in the doorway the same flyer I was handing out, which implied somebody had recently walked this same neighborhood. So, after an hour when my pen ran out of ink, I went home. I scanned the few walk sheets I had filled out and emailed them to the team leader. And in my own neighborhood I went out for a walk for exercise. I love this! Drag queens to get out the vote! From their website:

Drag Out The Vote™ is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that works with drag performers to promote participation in democracy. We educate and register voters at drag events online and offline, by organizing local and national voter activations. Led by fierce drag kings and queens across the nation, we advocate for increased voter access and engagement in 2020 and beyond.

Their goal is to get LGBT people and young people to vote. Help them sashay to the polls. Bill in Portland, Maine, who writes a Cheers and Jeers column for Daily Kos, summarized the Democratic and Republican campaign platforms with just a few words. I’ll summarize even more: Republican – “ME!” Democrat – “US!” Then he included a series of photos of Biden campaign signs in his neighborhood. As for results from all that balloting … I don’t expect anything substantial before I go to bed. Michigan’s Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson wrote an opinion piece for last Sunday’s Detroit Free Press with the headline Whatever it takes, we will count every vote. About 3 million ballots were cast ahead of time. The GOP controlled state legislature allowed those ballots to start being counted on election day – this morning. There is a lot of work to verify those ballots. The counting teams will be methodical and accurate. That means results should be known … by Friday. Today I’ve been wondering if the legislature was told the havoc the nasty guy is planning and made sure the vast majority of votes would be disqualified because of those plans. So my discussion of the election results will come tomorrow – or later – unless there is news that the nasty guy is messing with it. Meteor Blades, in his night owl column for Kos included this quote of the day:

The vote is the emblem of your equality, women of America, the guarantee of your liberty. That vote of yours has cost millions of dollars and the lives of thousands of women. Money to carry on this work has been given usually as a sacrifice, and thousands of women have gone without things they wanted and could have had in order that they might help get the vote for you. Women have suffered agony of soul which you can never comprehend, that you and your daughters might inherit political freedom. That vote has been costly. Prize it! The vote is a power, a weapon of offense and defense, a prayer. Understand what it means and what it can do for your country. Use it intelligently, conscientiously, prayerfully. ~~Carrie Chapman Catt

Blades also included an excerpt from Keisha Blain, writing for The Nation, discussing black women at the forefront of battling voter suppression. Dartagnan of the Kos community discussed a column by Frank Bruni in the New York Times. Dartagnan wrote:

That’s what Bruni’s column is about—how we can possibly reconcile ourselves to what Trump’s presidency has confirmed about the sheer, unrepentant ugliness of nearly half of this country’s voters.

Bruni wrote:

He didn’t sire white supremacists. He didn’t script the dark fantasies of QAnon. He didn’t create all the Americans who rebelled against protective masks and mocked those who wore them, a selfish mind-set that helps explain our tragic lot. It just flourished under him. And it will almost certainly survive him. The foul spirit of these past five years—I’m including his hateful campaign—has been both pervasive and strangely proud. That’s what makes it different. That’s what makes it so chilling.

And Dartagnan concluded:

The knowledge that so many of our fellow Americans are predisposed to this kind of virulent hatred is a difficult thing for many of us to accept. But the real question, should Democrats manage to win this election, is not what these people will do, but what we can do in order to ensure decency prevails. A convincing win by Joe Biden and Democrats across the board will not heal the divide in this country, but should at least restore (if nothing else) the uneasy parity that we enjoyed during the Obama years, when the worst impulses of our fellow citizens weren’t continually being stoked and amplified by a heedless and cynical demagogue named Donald Trump. Once he is gone, maybe we can start talking about building bridges again. That may be the best we can hope for.

Eric Liu is the CEO of Citizen University. He’s helping people engage in civic life. He spoke to David Greene of NPR. The audio is seven minutes. Here are some excerpts of Liu speaking taken from the transcript.

It's really hard to build those kinds of bridges if you start out with the most polarizing thing. Why did you vote for that idiot? Why did you do such a stupid thing? But if instead you actually begin with what shaped you? What formed your worldview? What were some of the big experiences in your life? And it may be even after you humanize this person and unpack a bit of their story that you'll still feel like, boy, this is just deeply sad to me now that I understand this person's story that they still voted this way. ... It's about having better arguments. You know, the problem in American civic life, even as polarized as we are right now, is not that we're having too many arguments. The problem is that we're having arguments that are too stupid. What we've got to be able to do is figure out how to have better arguments. And what that means is arguments that are more grounded in history, more literate in power, more honest and intelligent emotionally and recognizing that people do not come into these civic and political arguments as rational, calculating machines. We come in as feeling, hurting, loving, hoping human beings who want to be the heroes of our own stories. And if we can't acknowledge that same set of motivations in the person we're arguing with, then that's going to be really difficult. But when we do acknowledge that, that can, in fact, mean conflict. It can, in fact, mean tension. But that's OK. ... I think one of the most truly small C conservative principles there is is there are no rights without responsibilities. The only people who get rights unchecked without any responsibility are toddlers and sociopaths. The rest of us grown-ups who have some measure of pro-social responsibility recognize that this is just about a grown-up taking responsibility for how you move in the world. And when you just disregard it in a bout of selfish, hyper individualism, that's not conservative. It's not liberal either. It's just not productive. As much as the United States is a place that lives on a narrative of rugged individualism, rugged individualism never got a barn raised, never got a field cleared, never got a schoolhouse built. And everybody who has grown up in small-town America in a rural part of the country, in a conservative district or state, knows that the mythology of the lone cowboy figuring it all out by himself is just that, it's pure myth; that the only good things that have happened have happened because people came together in a way where they took responsibility for each other and with each other.

I found the webpage for Citizen University. It says CU is “building a culture of powerful, responsible citizenship.” I found this just in time: an election night gathering guide. The site suggests working through the guide with family, as a group of friends, perhaps even by yourself. The guide includes a music playlist, beginning with Lean on Me by Bill Withers and Rainbow Connection by Kermit the Frog. Then on to what it calls “civic scripture,” including Lincoln’s first inaugural address, A declaration of conscience by Senator Margaret Chase Smith in 1950, and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s remarks at a naturalization ceremony in 2018. There is poetry, such as Let America Be America Again by Langston Hughes. And finally a series of questions, such as: “Who inspires you to imagine something better than the status quo?” And: “What have you learned this year about our democracy and what it needs to be healthy & vibrant?” After feeling mellow from all that (especially Kermit), I turn to a contentious topic. The Kos front page feed had two stories, almost one after the other about the pro-life crowd. One of them is by SemDem of the Kos community who titled the post There’s no such thing as a principled ‘pro-lifer’. The basic premise is how can a person be pro-life if they support a president who puts kids in cages? SemDem looked at the religious argument against abortion. And essentially came up empty. There’s a lot of discussion about sexual sin and the evils of excess wealth. But the Bible is silent on abortion (which was known at the time). In addition, the Southern Baptist Convention originally supported Roe v. Wade. They changed their stance when they needed a new issue to rally the flock when racism wasn’t doing it for them. I add that reveals a supremacist outlook. It is supremacist to encourage your followers to support you because of your opposition of something important to the community. In this case it is racial inclusion, then women’s autonomy. On to SemDem’s discussion of the moral arguments. Many pro-life people also support violent and racist policies, such as kids in cages or pulling babies from their mothers. Somehow it’s always the victim’s fault and the policies are claimed to be justified. Last year, Alabama passed a law “protecting the sanctity of life” by banning all abortions, even in cases of rape and incest. They said there is no case where a fertilized egg can be terminated without it being an abomination. Yet, in vitro fertilization clinics are allowed to dispose of fertilized eggs every day. This is okay because the egg is “not in a woman” as Clyde Chambliss, the bill’s sponsor explained. SemDem translated:

It only counts if there’s a woman suffering in the equation. If there’s no woman to control, “pro-life” concerns suddenly disappear.

Abortions will always be available – to women rich enough to travel to a doctor who can perform it. And there are abortion protesters who have had abortions. SemDem wrote:

Anti-choicers are about control, not life. If they truly cared about “babies,” you’d see them volunteering at orphanages or adopting children themselves. They rarely do this. It’s more fun to lurk outside clinics in order to harass and punish women.

The other story is by Dartagnan. His argument is rather straightforward:

Anyone who was actually “pro-life” wouldn’t belong to a group of Americans who loudly and actively disdain efforts to protect others from infection by this novel coronavirus. Anyone who actually cared one iota about human lives wouldn’t attend a rally filled with others spewing their breath and spit in every direction, and cheering while a malignant idiot like Donald Trump (or any other Republican politician) tells them that social distancing and mask-wearing are infringements on their “freedom.” For these people, the only “freedom” they want is the freedom to put other peoples’ lives at risk. That’s not “pro-life” behavior. It’s pro-death. It’s saying to others that “your life isn’t important enough to me” to wear a mask. It’s saying “I don’t give a rat’s ass about your life.” It means you have such little regard for life, you don’t care if your behavior puts someone in a hospital or kills them.

That hypocrisy has been noticed by pro-choice organizations, such as NARAL. That group put together statements by Republican politicians that want the pandemic to kill more people alongside their statements about being pro-life.