In the last days of campaigning, Republicans are narrowing their election focus to the so-called independent voter and conservative Democrats. Pennsylvania GOP Senate candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz told his supporters their job is to talk to independent and conservative Democrat(sic) friends. They are to emphasize only three issues, economy, crime, and the border; these are “kitchen table issues,” he implored. I am a black man in America and the grandfather of three granddaughters of childbearing age who deserve body autonomy. I am part of the lineage of a black family who survived slavery, Jim Crow, the Courts, and maybe Donald Trump. A long-repeated adage in the black community is when America catches a cold, black America gets pneumonia.
I was told that I needed to understand the economic anxiety of conservatives—as if liberals do not suffer economic anxiety. America is sick, and death could be the diagnosis for members of marginalized communities. We are being attacked and murdered in grocery stores, synagogues, nightclubs, churches, and even our Capitol. The majority of these attacks were committed by radicalized conservatives, see racists. Despite utopian dreams and romantic visions of the perfect climate change candidate and a twenty-two-dollar-an-hour minimum wage, we have a binary choice. I have decided that a temporarily inflated four-dollar gallon of gas or a four-dollar gallon of milk is not worth sacrificing America’s rapidly decreasing freedoms.
The Republicans are running over 200 election deniers on ballots nationwide, openly vowing that fair elections are a thing of the past if elected. They are trafficking in childish fantasies ranging from Democrats eating children and drinking their blood to Hillary Clinton being dead and replaced by a body double and JFK Jr. being the secret Vice President. I am reminded of abolitionist and orator Frederick Douglass’s quote, “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” The Republicans are a group of broken children playing with matches, and I have reached my limits of trying to repair them
The recent and vile attack on the husband of the Speaker of the House, Paul Pelosi, is a prime example of the GOP’s dangerous reliving of their childhoods. Following the attack on Paul Pelosi and almost without pause, the lies and fantasies began to take shape in Republican circles of influence. Veiled attacks on the LGBTQIA community designed for the appetites of their base of bigots—labeling the hammer attack on Mr. Pelosi as a lover’s quarrel gone awry made its insidious appearance. On an obscure podcast, the former President speculated the glass door the intruder apparently smashed, was broken from the inside, efforting to fuel deranged conjecture about the attacker being a friend of Speaker Pelosi’s husband.
The GOP has not only lost its bearings, but it has also lost its mind. The Republicans who are rational enough to speak the truth are excised like a cyst. When did common sense become courageous? Jeff Flake, Adam Kinzinger, and Liz Cheney, whose Republican policy credentials are beyond reproach, are called courageous. Speaking of Rep. Kinzinger, he may have put it best, “Liz [Cheney] and I are not courageous. There’s no strength in this. We’re just surrounded by cowards,”said Kinzinger. In less than a week, America can take the simple path to get off the road to madness—VOTE.
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