Two Elephants, actually.\u00a0 One is Election Day, and the other is one party of candidates.<\/p>\n
The first Elephant is a reminder to US citizens that voting is not just a privilege, but a duty…and a related duty is not interfering with anyone else’s right to vote.\u00a0 So please, if you haven’t voted during early voting, do vote on Election Day.\u00a0\u00a0 And please, remember that your right to vote is no more sacred than any other citizen’s right to vote, and harassing, threatening, or otherwise interfering in someone else’s right to vote is both illegal and ethically wrong.\u00a0\u00a0 So vote, and then let others vote without interfering.<\/p>\n
The second Elephant is the symbol of the party now controlling the federal (and some state) government.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Its theory of government has caused three hundred thousand excess deaths so far this year, with two months to go, two hundred thirty thousand of those excess deaths acknowledged to be from COVID-19and a current rate of a thousand excess deaths a day from COVID-19 alone.\u00a0 And this has led to the nation with only four and a quarter percent of the world’s population having 25% of the pandemic’s deaths.\u00a0 It is also poised to attack this nation’s major source of retirement income and medical care for most people over 65: Social Security and Medicare (yes, in the face of a pandemic.)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And has already attacked all environmental protections–allowing more pollution of the air and water (already evident) ,\u00a0 because people threatened with a lung-and-heart damaging illness (or having one already) really need more toxic crap in their bodies.<\/p>\n
Do I have a dog in this hunt, you may ask?\u00a0 Well, yes, I do.\u00a0 I lost a sister-in-law (husband’s younger brother’s wife) to COVID-19, and the younger brother was also sick with it.\u00a0\u00a0 Our small town’s city secretary and several of her family members were sick with it.\u00a0 Some kids on the football team.\u00a0\u00a0 A few others.\u00a0 Noticeable people, to their families, and in the case of the city secretary, the person who kept the city running, along with our mayor.\u00a0 I also have an economic dog in this hunt, a building in my home town that the Elephant notion of international policy turned from a reliable, if modest, moneymaker into a dead loss, made even deader by COVID-19.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general in my state, all being loyal elephants locked onto the tail of the big Elephant, have publicly argued that people like me (like them, too, but they know they’re special snowflakes, for whom the freezers will always be available come the hot days) …that people like me are not worth worrying about in a pandemic.\u00a0 We should not only “just die” but should be willing and eager<\/em> to die to save the otherwise shaky economy that keeps their donors pouring millions into their election efforts.\u00a0 Their younger and even smugger elephants opine that “those getting sick are mostly elderly or Hispanic”…in other words, worthless in their accounting.\u00a0\u00a0 As long as the rich are getting richer faster, who cares what happens to the old, the poor, the sick, the disabled, the darker-skinned?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I do.\u00a0 Being, as it were, in one or two of those categories and having many friends and family members in the others.<\/p>\n So that’s the end of the Elephant discussion…lots more could be said, and has been said, and is still being said, and ordinarily I’d put this on Facebook, but for the inconvenient difficulty that right now I can’t access Facebook because it’s on a permanent rapid re-load on my machines and I don’t have the time to try to unstick it.<\/p>\n Vote.\u00a0 Vote in every category.\u00a0\u00a0 Vote however you want, but Vote.<\/p>\n Thank you.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Two Elephants, actually.\u00a0 One is Election Day, and the other is one party of candidates. The first Elephant is a reminder to US citizens that voting is not just a privilege, but a duty…and a related duty is not interfering with anyone else’s right to vote.\u00a0 So please, if you haven’t voted during early voting, Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[17],"class_list":["post-554","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-beyond-writing","tag-life-beyond-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=554"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":555,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554\/revisions\/555"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}