Small Words
I voted yesterday. Then I spent most of the day in a funk. Part of it was physical. A long day on my feet on Sunday left my wonky back in bad shape and reminded me of my mortality. And voting in an election, which might be my last, where one of the presidential candidates is the most petty, vacuous, amoral, self-aggrandizing man I’ve ever known left me thinking how sad it was, if these are my final days, to go out on such a note.
It was bad enough for me the first time he won because at the same time my wife’s illness was progressing. So, it was just four years of despair and white supremacists. But taking care of her was a good distraction. He lost in 2020 so that lifted my spirits, but then my wife died, so those doldrums continued. Now he’s back and she’s still gone and that seems a poor trade. Although, there’s a chance he might lose to a woman this time, and that seems poetic justice for a man who has fondled, groped, and demeaned women throughout his life.
And a part of me doesn’t want to say all this because in reality I’m a tiny man. Afraid. A grain of sand on a beach. A whisper in a hurricane. A laugh in a thunderstorm. Nothing I say will do much except possibly irritate some of my friends who fancy themselves conservatives and maybe support the man in question. I don’t know. But this is how I feel. And I want to say it out loud because it would be sadder still, for me, to never have spoken out, even in a tiny way, in the face of what I view as the peril the man in question represents if he gets a second chance at power.