#oklahoma summer is really brutal and it's hardly begun

[sergle]

he's just a handsome young man, your honor

[bigenderbefriender]

It’s approaching midnight here in Oklahoma on November 2, 2020, and before election day begins in earnest, I wanted to write out a few of my thoughts.  I don’t know how much analysis I’ll actually do; this is mostly a record of how I feel, how the world is, and how I perceive it.  Maybe a year or two down the line, I’ll be able to look back on this and shore up some memories, though hopefully I won’t ever forget what I’ve seen over the past four years.

Let me start with this, then.  No one knows what’s going to happen.  The perennial discourse about the electoral college is in full swing, and as usual, Republicans are blocking it because they benefit massively from the rampant conservatism (racism) of rural states such as my own.  All the news talks about these days is the election cycle and COVID; I can hardly blame them.  It’s almost all I think about, too.  That said, half of Oklahomans went without power this week due to a massive ice storm, including most of my social circle, and it didn’t even make a blip in the national news.  Likewise, Hurricane Zeta tore a path through Louisiana then up the East Coast last week, and it only got a cursory mention, despite being the fifth such hurricane to make landfall in Louisiana this year.  The destruction there is nigh incalculable.

Texas governor Greg Abbott has been in a campaign to suppress voters in urban areas in this election cycle, his most egregious success being to limit the number of polling places per county to one, meaning large cities that fall under one county must all vote at the same place.  This will inevitably lead to a number of citizens being unable or unwilling to vote, predominantly in those large cities where lines will be several hours long, and the risk of COVID will be high.  Texan Republicans have also tried to throw out drive-thru ballots on the order of 120,000 votes, but this was blocked by Andrew Hanon.  The voter suppression is quite likely because for the first time in several elections, Texas is legitimately competitive this year.  I don’t think it will flip to the Democratic Party, but if it does I would be quite happy.

Other states have also been engaging in voter suppression, but there are people working against it.  Stacey Abrams, after her narrow defeat (1.4%) in the 2018 gubernatorial race in Georgia, has continued her commitment to ending voter suppression there, and she claims that she has done so quite successfully.  I suppose that remains to be seen, but I am hopeful.  Little news is coming out of places like North Carolina, though, and that’s scary, since voter suppression there is so prominent and so ugly.  In addition, Trump has been calling on militias, whom I will not name so as to keep them away from this post, to enact stochastic violence against voters whom they believe will vote Democratic.

In truth, that’s only the tip of the iceberg.  Since the summer, Trump has been questioning the legitimacy of mail-in ballots, certainly in an attempt to provide precedent for his contesting of the election results.  If they go in his favor, I’m sure he’ll love whatever the election says, but much like with Hillary Clinton, it looks like he’ll lose the popular election.  Experts are predicting a “blue shift” over the course of the election cycle.  That is, Republicans by and large are ignoring the threats of the coronavirus, which means they’re much more likely to vote in person on November 3.  This means it will appear that Trump has won the election on Novemeber 3, but as mail-in ballots get counted, the electorate will begin to sway towards Biden.  I may make a prediction here, though it is a grim one.  I believe that Trump will try to call the election on November 3 proper, and he will use his newfound influence on the Supreme Court (aka his nominee and now justice Amy Coney Barrett) to halt the count of mail-in ballots that might prove him wrong.  Many people say our democracy is in crisis, but quite honestly, I think this is a natural conclusion to the way that politics have been going since basically the Clinton era.

What I mean by that is to say that Trump’s presidency has done an excellent job of exposing long-lasting structural issues in American society, and Democrats have made #resist into an aesthetic to win their re-elections rather than actually leveraging the power they do have.  I’d say it must be hard, against someone who’s as much of a political opportunist as Sen Maj Ldr Mitch McConnell (R-KY), but the truth is that all of these people are perfectly content to campaign on decorum rather than on fixing any of the actual issues facing the US.

It’s not all bad; Biden has been pushed quite a bit to the left by the growing progressive wing of the Democratic Party, organized in part by the Justice Democrats and represented by Sen Bernie Sanders (Ind. VT), Rep Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D NY), Rep Ilhan Omar (D MN), Rep Rashida Tlaib (D MI), and Rep Ayanna Pressley (D MA).  The latter four are colloquially referred to as “The Squad,” and they fight alongside others for progressive policies out of the House of Representatives.  I would hate to go through an entire post about my feelings on national politics without mentioning the few good things we do have going for us.  In addition, voters have come out in record numbers this year.  As of this morning NPR reported that four states have had more early voting than total voters in 2016.  In a democracy, one of the major challenges is to stimulate citizen participation in government; citizens are certainly participating this year.

Also, this year has been a year that will be remembered for its social movements.  The Black Lives Matter movement came back into full swing, and the role of the police is now a legitimate question in many people’s minds.  Of course, this is a frustrating thing to talk about, too.  The demands of Black Lives Matter as a movement are so simple, yet over and over again, police show that they are more dedicated to violence than to justice.  In addition, white people across the country have shown that they are more dedicated to law and order than to making a country in which everyone can live.  This seems odd to me, though I know that it is specifically racially motivated.  It’s not like I’m just having this realization now; my grandparents are Party Republicans, and I couldn’t convince them to vote to kick Walmart out of their town, even when they know exactly how it’s screwed them.  To ask them to empathize with a Black person, even a Black neighbor?  Believe me, I’ve tried.  Still, we did see (are seeing) a lot of good from the protests.  Colorado basically ended qualified immunity, which means that police should be a lot more accountable for their actions in the future.  We also saw several experiments in what a society could look like without policing.  The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle was the most famous of these, though it fell apart in part due to its popularity.  Others that did not have the spotlight on them did not fall apart so spectacularly (though I have to speculate that all of CHAZ’s sisters have been disbanded by now).

That said, there’s a lot to fear in the coming days.  The only thing we know about this election is that we won’t know the result for days or even weeks after polling closes.  Because of that, many fear that protests will break out across the country on election day.  The protests themselves aren’t the bad thing, I think.  What’s bad is that the protests will be the targets of white supremacist violence (if the protesters are pro-Biden) or the perpetrators thereof, especially now that Trump has condoned militia violence against citizens.  Over the summer, Trump also used a secret police force (under the Department of Homeland Security, specifically Customs and Border Patrol) against protesters in Portland, Oregon to quell unrest.  Unsurprisingly, it didn’t work, since the protests were against police brutality.  However, the system is now there for him to use, and CBP is only growing bigger by the day.  If protests do break out in the weeks following the election, I have no doubt that CBP will be there throwing people into unmarked vans and jailing them without due process.

I have so much more to say.  I haven’t even gotten into the border wall, or family separation, or the assassination of Iranian dignitaries, or attacks on abortion rights, or Mitch McConnell’s stalling of the Senate, or the individual stages of failure of the COVID-19 response and how I learned about them, or the use of said COVID-19 to grant ICE carte blanche to deport people without trial, or any of the myriad other political issues of which I’ve become aware over the past four years.  I also haven’t even begun to write out my thoughts on my local politics or Oklahoma politics specifically (quite honestly, I think local politics will forever stay offline, seeing as though I’d really rather not give out too much identifying information here).  But I think this post has gone on long enough.  Perhaps I will write more on those other topics in the future.  I am afraid for tomorrow, and I am afraid for the months and years to come.  I do not wish to live in interesting times, but it seems I am cursed to do so.  At least I can say I was a witness.  It is now 12:40 AM, November 3, 2020.  The election is in 6 hours, and I am scared.