Link List: VOTE, PLEASE 🇺🇸

Adam Jahnke
By Adam Jahnke, Oct 5, 2020.
Tagged link-list. 4 minute read.

[so much time and none it to

grieve](https://annehelen.substack.com/p/so-much-time-and-none-it-to-grieve)

A beautiful article by Anne Helen Petersen:

Whatever grief you are feeling, whether related to COVID or otherwise, whether anticipatory or existential, whether related to your own health or the world’s or your community’s — it matters. It doesn’t matter more, but it matters. And that means we have to continue to find words for it, continue to allow it to shape our lives, continue to allow it to piss us off. If you can’t face the depths of it in this moment, that’s okay. But again: grief doesn’t go away when ignored. It blackens and sours. It turns us away from others instead of towards them.

[Praying for a Reckless

President](https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com/p/praying-for-a-reckless-president)

Here's a sharp contrast between David French's take on how Christians should respond to the President being hospitalized with COVID:

It is thus right and good to pray for the speedy healing and quick recovery even of a reckless president. That does not relieve him of political accountability for his actions—or us of the obligation to hold him to account—but we all know what it is like to suffer. We all know what it is like to feel pain. We should pray against his pain.

And Glen Greenwald's sharp critique of Democrats willing to pray for a "Facist Dictator":

The typical reaction to the death of a tyrant — whether by revolutionary violence or natural causes — is not one of grief and sadness but joyous celebration. It is not hard to understand why: when a nation and its oppressed citizenry are finally liberated from the suffocating, savage grip of fascist dictatorship, they feel joy for themselves, their families and the future of their nation.

[...]

Why would you possibly wish a speedy recovery — rather than a quick demise — to someone you believe is a Hitler-like perpetrator of genocide whose recovery would enable fascism to continue? That seems counter-intuitive and counter-productive.

I can understand the critique of armageddon-like language to sully the image of your political opponents, Greenwald has sort of built a career of calling that out on "both sides", but why perpetrate the cancerous lie of evil-for-evil?

Alas, grace confounds.

[Why this pro-life conservative is voting for Joe

Biden](https://chicago.suntimes.com/columnists/2020/8/27/21404595/pro-life-movement-conservative-politics-donald-trump-joe-biden-election-2020-mona-charen)

Mona Charen writing for the Chicago Sun Times:

I have been pro-life my entire adult life. I haven’t changed. I continue to find the practice of abortion abhorrent and will persist in trying to persuade others. While I would prefer to vote for someone who upholds the right to life, I’ve never believed that electing presidents who agree with me will lead to dramatic changes in abortion law, nor is the law itself the only way to discourage abortion. The number of abortions has been declining steadily since

  1. It dropped during Republican presidencies and during Democratic presidencies, and now stands below the rate in 1973, when Roe v. Wade was decided and when abortion was illegal in 44 states.

    It’s wrong to take innocent life. But other things are immoral too. It’s also wrong to swindle people, to degrade and demonize, to incite violence, to bully, and while we’re at it, to steal, to bear false witness, to commit adultery and to covet.

    [...]

    There is putrefaction where the Republican Party’s essence should be, and appointing pro-life judges cannot mask the stench. So, this conservative is voting for the Democrats. Will the GOP reform? I hope so. But my priority isn’t trying to heal the Republican Party. It’s trying to heal the country.

Oh, also, here's a guy talking on the internet:

If you think that being pro-life has only to do with abortion legality, please learn up, then vote. Capital punishment, redlining, torture, caged separation of children from parents. "Life" also includes the time you are alive after you are an infant.

While we're on the subject of our fearless leader, this is a great Tweet thread by Andy Slavitt, Former Health Care Head under Obama. Read the whole thread starting here:

But this was my favorite:

✌🏻