Dear World

In which this American gets political

Dear World,

It’s alarming to be cast as the latest world supervillain and while most of us don’t blame you one bit there is also a desire to have you understand that we, the American people, have also been villainized. You might not be seeing the whole picture. In Fascist Oligarchical regimes such as the one currently operating in the U.S. it's common to suppress news. Our major news purveyors are under attack. If you are a melanated human or LGBTQIA+ or in any way disabled you have been removed from major newspapers and news stations.

These same major news agencies are not reporting the mass demonstrations across the country or the enormous volume of phone calls to Senators and Congressional Representatives that have overloaded switchboards and message boxes. It’s also unlikely that you’ve heard that just five weeks into his “Presidency” or “Monarchy” or “Supreme Leadership” that things aren’t looking all that rosy for Herr King Trump but he still basks in his ever present self inflicted orange glow.

I'm not trying to suggest that we’re innocent either. Americans are known for being greedy, impatient, rude, loud and incapable of discerning facts from alternate facts (formerly known as fiction). Our political system is in shambles and has been since we had the audacity to elect a brilliant and competent black man as President. Many of us really hoped our country was ready. I was dismayed and disturbed to hear from a female friend after that election in which she expressed that the results made her “nauseous”. Unfortunately any forward momentum created by this election of Barack Obama was met with swift and ugly pushback. Progress was undone and blocked. Hatred, bigotry, racism, conspiracy, sexism crawled out from under the rocks where they’d been working in hiding.

Many of us have waited, patiently and now less so, to elect a woman.

Russian interference, The Republican party, Donald Trump, Elon Musk and other rich assholes and, the MAGA hat wearers are the real villains.

I’ve heard many people both inside and outside the U.S. say “Americans voted for this”, “More than half of the population supports this” and I need to correct this fallacy.

Disenfranchisement

In 2020 when Joe Biden ran for president against the incumbent Donald Trump more than 158.4 million people showed up to vote, approximately 67% of all eligible voters. For America, where we don’t have a dedicated holiday for Election Day, where many eligible voters aren’t registered (due to ever fluctuating state laws about registration. In 2024 only 23 states and the District of Columbia allowed same day registration.), and where we have a long history of voter suppression (I’ll give you three guesses as to whose votes are being suppressed, but if you’re a thinking person you’ll probably get it in one) these numbers are hardly surprising. Formerly enslaved black MEN were given the right to vote in 1870 but still had to be literate to do so (not an easy task at that time) and women were given the right to vote fifty years later in 1920. To this day many eligible voters are unable to get to polling places because their polling places have been changed or are out of the way and they lack transportation or face long lines if they can actually get time off, find their polling place and manage to get there. And then there’s the weather. If your polling place has lines around the block and it’s blazing hot or miserably rainy and cold, you don’t have childcare, you’re losing income because you’re not working, you’re hungry, wet, tired, thirsty, in need of the bathroom… how long are you going to stay? In 2020 severe tornadoes in Nashville forced early closing and consolidation of polling places.

In our country without compulsory voting laws, an almost 70% turnout is considered enormous. Joe Biden won this election. Since 2020 many state voting laws have changed under Republican congressional control and this means that early voting, absentee voting or voting by mail have been altered making voting access even more difficult. The U.S. lags behind 30 other countries - most of western Europe, Australia, S. Korea, Indonesia, New Zealand, Mexico, etc. in the percentage of voters who show up to vote.

244 million Americans were eligible to vote in 2024 and 63.7% of them actually did, down almost 4% from the previous presidential election.

Remember again that 244,000,000 Americans were eligible to vote in November of 2024. Only about 64% of those people actually cast ballots. Of those ballots Trump won 77,284,118 votes, 49.8% of the vote, not quite 50%. Of the eligible voters 166,715,882 people did NOT vote for him. In other words 68% of eligible voters in the U.S. did not vote for Trump and Fascism. His opponent won 74, 999,166 votes or 48.3 percent of votes cast. I’m not a mathematician but I fail to see how this represents over half the country supporting him.

https://www.cfr.org/article/2024-election-numbers

https://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/what-is-voter-turnout-voting-behavior-625262/