Several weeks ago, Jon Stewart warned The Daily Show viewers that no matter who wins the presidential election this fall, we’re all going to need to be ready. It wasn’t said with a fear-mongering tone; he wasn’t saying things will be bad if Biden loses, so you better vote for him. Stewart recognized that even if Biden is re-elected (and that’s a big “if”), the populace will not be settled.
Fast forward to today where I got lost in the comment section of a “Gen-Xer’s” hot take about voting third party. Scrolling past would have been better for my blood pressure, but this creator was regurgitating the same bullshit we’ve heard before; that things will be worse under Trump, that it’s effectively pointless to vote third party, and that this is just the political reality we’re in. I consider this “bullshit” not because it isn’t true, but because it’s always leveraged in order to maintain the status quo.
I tried to curb my frustration when I commented saying, “Counterpoint: What if voting for Biden perpetuates the same political complacency of the masses, thus allowing someone like Biden to disenfranchise more people without them noticing?” It wasn’t taken lightly. He responded by saying my point was invalidated by the fact that I’m not offering a viable solution (though in his video, he dismissed “revolution” as ridiculous, so I don’t think he’d be ready for a conversation around the Land Back movement, which I pointed out later on), to which I responded by saying essentially that surrendering to the status quo wasn’t a solution either. I also pointed out that expecting a well-thought-out “solution” in the comment section of a TikTok with fewer than 200 views was probably more ridiculous than hoping for a revolution before November.
That didn’t seem to sit well. We exchanged a couple insults and then I blocked him because I don’t actually have that kind of time to argue in comment sections. And since he only seemed to be looking to attract people who already agreed with him, it wasn’t going to go anywhere.
But it’s not that I’m okay with a second Trump presidency. There are so many things that will get immeasurably worse if he’s elected again. Roe v. Wade getting overturned was the tip of the iceberg of the conservative agenda; so many human rights are now on the chopping block. And with the way Republicans were able to pack the courts at all levels through Trump, those human rights will be fast-tracked to the ultra-conservative Supreme Court. A second term under Biden might stop the bleeding and prevent another fundamental right from being overturned.
But I honestly don’t believe Biden will win – whether I vote for him or not. Democrats seem to forget that hardly anyone wanted Biden in the first place; he just happened to have more money in his campaign fund. And in the lead-up to the general election in the Fall of 2020, there was a lot of political chatter about Biden embracing the role of a one-term president. So why should I waste the energy trying to rally support for him when I don’t believe he’ll win, and even if he did, I’d rather have someone else as president?
Because I cannot support genocide. And Biden bypassed congress to send military support to Israel to help with their genocide against Palestine.
At this point, the only thing I feel compelled to support is a total overhaul of the entire political system. And not in the sense of trimming away a few bad branches, no; I’m talking about uprooting the whole fucking thing and starting new.
It’s wildly impractical, yes. But it’s what I want.
No more dead Palestinians.
No more billionaires hoarding land and resources while the rest of us side-gig our way through survival.
No more colonial states.
No more corporate pollution that leaves us with “Boil water” advisories for decades.
No more capitalism at all.
Like I said, it’s impractical. There are too many people who’ve internalized the false promises of the American Dream and still think that it’s a matter of small adjustments here and there before we achieve Utopia. As if individualism has been the right answer all along, but with the wrong implementation. Like the guy I argued with this morning, these are the folks who occupy the middle voter block; not in total agreement with either major party, but still obsessed with a capitalist mindset.
There’s a reason the phrase is “Two sides of the same coin,” in reference to the American political system; the real God of the US is money. It’s the most bipartisan cause in any Congress.
And that’s why the whole thing needs to go.
It was built by stolen labor on stolen land, and they’ve been trying to recreate the same thing in Palestine thinking we won’t notice. Thinking that we’re just immature, rebellious kids who don’t want to work.
And yeah, I don’t want to work. I want to write novels, learn how to grow vegetables, build my own furniture, cook meals for loved ones, and spend my nights reading. But none of that matters if it means Palestinian babies are bombed, to say nothing of the men and women who are tortured, raped, and murdered in front of their families. Some get their heads blown off by snipers while others are targeted by a drone strike – all while Israeli soldiers laugh and mock them.
I don’t want to work under these conditions.
When the spectrum of death goes from an infant victim of a drone strike to a man slowly run over by a tank (and whose only identifiable feature was a hand with a zip-tie around it), there’s no spinning this as a positive thing.
Israel is thirsty for blood and we keep empowering them to take it – the primary enabler of it all is none other than Joe Biden, the one who thinks he deserves our vote in the Fall. The one who thinks he’s better than Trump, when the reality is he’s no less violent; the violence is just being out-sourced instead of Made in America like an Israeli bomb.
In both the 2016 and 2020 elections, in response to Trump’s popularity, the Democrats embraced the strategy of “harm reduction.” The idea was we “vote Blue no matter who” as a means of minimizing the damage to Americans – reducing the numbers of COVID casualties and keeping the economy from becoming completely unstable. Whether or not we were successful is irrelevant at this point; Biden failed at many promises and created a monster in the Jordan Valley – one that he has been unwilling to control.
And I am simply one among many who think it’s time we have a system in place that can prevent genocides, that can roll Israel’s expansion back while granting Palestine its own statehood. We have too many elected officials who are, arguably, dead inside and okay with the colonial state of Israel because it helps protect the colonial united states here at home, which keeps them in power and the rest of us “working” ourselves to death.
We genuinely don’t know how long we have left on this planet. I would love to see my nephews and nieces go through college not for the false promise of a good job, but for the experience of being exposed to new ideas and new ways of thinking. I want a revitalization of Indigenous communities that requires land being returned to its original occupants, and not as some gesture of charity for some politician, but for the replenishment of life to the land and its people. And I want to be able to live a healthy life well into my 70’s or 80’s instead of having to make sure my will and testament is in order whenever a new apocalyptic event looms on the horizon.
I want us all to dream beyond the limitations of capitalism. Sure, it’s unlikely in the next six months. But if not now, then when?
Jon Stewart was right. No matter who we are or how we vote, we’re going to need to stay engaged beyond November. And there’s no better time than right now.
Free Palestine.
Scribal Practices 