Hi, there, Dear Reader. It’s early afternoon here in New Hometown, Florida on Election Day (November 3, 2020). Currently, the temperature is 76˚F (24˚C) under mostly sunny skies. With humidity at 54% and a northeasterly breeze blowing at 13 MPH (21 KM/H), the feels-like temperature is…76˚F (24˚C). Today’s forecast calls for a high of 76˚F (24˚C) and partly sunny skies. At night, the skies will be mostly cloudy, and the low is expected to reach 61˚F (16˚C).
As I said earlier, today is Election Day in the United States, although millions of my fellow citizens have either voted early or mailed their ballots to avoid the crowds – a wise precaution in a global pandemic – and (especially) any hassles at the polls from self-appointed “poll watchers” who support the current President of the United States. I am worried that there will be violent incidents across the country involving folks like the Proud Boys and other pro-Trump right-wing militia, but I’m hoping that even the most hot-headed of my fellow Democrats will refuse to be baited into anything more heated than an exchange of insults.
I, of course, already voted. I did so as far back as late September, though I can’t say that I filled out my ballot on the same day that I received it in the mail. I only had pens with blue, green, or purple ink, and the ballots must be marked properly with black ink only. So I ordered a package of black-ink pens from Amazon; I voted as soon as the pens arrived and placed the sealed and duly-signed envelope into the mailbox personally. And because I don’t trust the Postmaster General – a wealthy ally of Donald J. Trump who has taken steps to make voting by mail difficult – I tracked my ballot’s progress from the house to the office of the county’s Supervisor of Elections. (It arrived safely at its destination two days after I mailed it, and it’s been officially counted, so…)
I, naturally, did not vote for Trump. I have 231,599 reasons (and counting) for not giving Donald J. Trump my vote, although his mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic is just one of the many missteps and idiocies he and his Administration have inflicted on the United States and the world since he took the oath of office nearly four years ago.
Seriously. I cannot and will not support a President who constantly and deliberately uses the bully pulpit of his office to be, well, a bully, a con man, and a pathological liar. I’m not naïve; I know that anyone who enters the rough-and-tumble world of politics is going to bend the truth to suit his or her political agenda and make promises that sound great in principle but are really hard to fulfill, especially in a mixed political system like ours, where – for good or ill – there is tension between two opposing parties/schools of political thought and bipartisanship often requires compromises. Most of the Presidents I helped elect (starting with Ronald Reagan in 1984 and ending with Barack Obama in 2012) have either overstated aspects of their policies or could not fulfill certain campaign promises because the opposite party’s Congressional delegation (in both houses) didn’t cooperate with the sitting President.
But Trump? Trump tells so many lies – sometimes even contradicting himself in the same occasion – that I frankly lost interest in keeping track of them. And his penchant for being the divider, rather than the nation’s unifying leader, is so mortifying, even terrifying. Until Donald Trump came along, I had never seen or heard a President of the United States support, in public even, any violent armed group that is dedicated to right-wing ideology or white supremacy – at least not in my lifetime.
And I am not fond of his red cap-wearing “Make America Great Again” crowd, either. Many of the ones I run into in the virtual plazas of social media come across as ill-informed, cultish, and virulently authoritarian men and women who would like to make the U.S. into a mashup of the fictitious version of 1950s America depicted in 1950s sitcoms such as Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. I get both angry and depressed when I see how rude and hateful the MAGA folks are toward anyone who has views that are dissimilar to their own and put up comments such as these on Facebook and other social media sites:
Save America from A** HOLE demoRATS. Vote RED.
“Together, me and Pamela Farris will defeat George in the election today. We will make the United States of Washington safe agian and stop COVID-17.”
With those long lines things are looking great for Trump. Unless of course the Democrats are successful with their massive vote by mail voter fraud schemes!
I don’t know how any person who is true to God can be a Democrat PERIOD!!!!
And this is just a tiny selection of comments from Trump supporters on Facebook.
I will try to avoid watching the election returns tonight. I am hoping that many of my fellow Democratic Party adherents will not repeat the mistake they made back in 2016 and vote rather than being complacent or even apathetic. I also hope that the Biden-Harris ticket wins, although I am aware that there is a chance that Trump could win in a tight race.
Anyway, I must now close and start working on my novel for NaNoWriMo 2020. Hopefully I’ll be able to produce a bit over 1667 words today; I have fallen short of this goal on Days One and Two of the contest. Wish me luck, Dear Reader, cos I need all the luck I can get.
A Certain Point of View, Too 
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