Bracketing my life is a super irony, one I’d as likely exchange for another: involvement with the U.S. polls. My father, who could not vote, exploited me and my teddy bear of the moment at the U.S. polls where he made me stand with him just past the line where “electioneering” was banned (and presidents didn’t order more trashing of high speed mail sorters to get elected) and insisted my teddy bear wear a sign: “Win with Wilkie.” I was 8 years old.
This week, I have continued writing post cards to reluctant or intimidated voters urging them to vote early “to avoid long lines on Election Day.” I’m on my 4th batch of 100. So far, nationwide, some 15,000,000 post cards have already made their way, thanks to our relentlessly hard working post people, to swing states.
Distilling what’s important in the space of a post card is never easy. For the sake of cutting to the chase, I want to share with all my readers what’s quintessential. It goes like this:
Make sure your vote gets counted either by dropping off your completed ballot in a secure, dedicated postal drop box, or walking it in to your appropriate city offices. That’s it, folks. That's the strategy for avoiding any interference, no matter how “presidential” with a U.S. election. That way you bypass mailing altogether. It’s the only way you can insure your vote gets counted.
Here’s this week’s ask: please forward this advice to every single one of the people of good faith on your list. You can do that simply by copy/pasting the above paragraph, or if you prefer, forwarding this entire newsletter, which you can do easily by clicking where it says “click to read this newsletter on your browser” which will cause the link to come up, and copy pasting that link in your message. Please do that. We are voting for our lives.
At stake: The planet.
This administration has rolled back countless environmental protections,
including drilling for oil in the pristine Alaskan National Wildlife refuge. As a result we are seeing a surge in abnormal weather
events: a trashed Gulf Coast, hundreds of thousands, many already dispossessed
with their furniture piled up in the streets, challenged with untold suffering,
floods in Yemen and Ohio wiping out 40% of the corn crop, fires in Brazil and
California trashing an area vast as the Grand Canyon, and migrations world wide
by people starving, fleeing land too parched for farming, drowning as they
attempt the Mediterranean, or children separated at the border as their
families attempt entry into the Disunited States.
Social security: Suspending the FISA (payroll tax) guarantees that Social Security will be bankrupt in three years. The billions of wages that we have earned over a lifetime of work (my own work history stretches 74 years) will simply vanish.