Next week, America votes.
Not yet registered? I beg. Stop the scroll and register here.
Registered and know family/friends unlikely to vote? We need you to do something, pumpkin. Maybe it’s writing them an IOU. Or sharing lunch post-vote. Or driving them to Walmart and the ferris wheel and ice-cream on the way home, I don’t fcn know—this is when we need you to show up.
If our votes really didn’t count, folks wouldn’t be so shook they’re willing to upend democracy.
Think about that. Youth, African-Americans and Latinos rocked the vote so irrevocably in 2008 and again in 2012, extreme right wing factions got to work undoing the most sacred tenant of any self-respecting democracy: one person one vote.
You don’t need me to tell you how Mitch has overseen a party willing to rewrite even the most basic voting rules, like handing someone water while they stand in line to vote. You also don’t need me to school you on why and how such pernicious policy harks back to black voter suppression and intimidation used throughout Jim Crow.
My Reminder? Choose Women.
When you vote next week, remember us. When any party or regime is willing to make women’s rights its scapegoat to “win”, everyone else’s rights are really not that far behind on the chopping block. Clarence Thomas pretty much admitted this in his opinion this summer.
And Iran today looks like a test case for what happens when women’s rights are optional. Everybody suffers. Everybody’s rights are threatened.
The fight in Iran is for a woman’s right to choose—to wear a hijab or not.
Similarly, the fight in the U.S. is for a woman’s right to choose—to be in her body.
In both countries, women’s bodies are a litmus test for a larger violence that happens when a limited few control our larger narrative, guided solely by their fear and pain. Funny thing is those big and hairy monsters who’d control women’s bodies and our societies are not alone. We all carry fears and pain. That’s called being human.
And yet, we get to choose love over fear. Choose Love next Tuesday
