I voted for Megan Barry.
Hi, I’m a fool who is setting myself up to get fooled again, who has apparently not learned any lessons, and I’m here to eat a little public crow.
A year ago, I said I wouldn’t vote for Megan Barry in Tennessee's 7th Congressional District race, that I’d just write someone else in. But when I was actually standing there at the ballot screen, I poked her name with the coffee stirrer they handed me at the check-in station.
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Nothing about my opinion on Barry has changed. She pleaded guilty to a felony. She’s lucky she didn't face prison time. And I personally find the enthusiasm about her candidacy shameful and confusing. But she’s not Mark Green. She’s not on the record voting for the cruel, anti-regular-person agenda of the Republicans. She’s not going to give a shit about who is doing what in my vagina, and she’s not going to vote to force women to serve as the mausoleums of dead fetuses. Plus, she’s not Trump’s buddy.
I can’t say the same about incumbent Mark Green.
I also voted for Harris. I’m not excited about her. Watching her slide right to pander to a bunch of Republicans who want to be lied to that they’re still important and someone still thinks they’re smart and worthwhile, and that once the Trump fever dream has ended, they can go back to being in charge of the Republican party makes me want to vomit. It’s so typical of the Democrats to try to build coalitions with people who hate them.
And I have lefty friends who aren’t going to vote for Harris because she won’t take a decisive stand on Israel and our nation supplying weapons that Israel is using to attack hospitals and kill children. And I get it. I do. Seeing all the images of dead children, it’s just not bearable. Seeing that guy hooked up to an IV, burning alive in a hospital bed?
The conservative Republican's divorce scandal further demonstrates what we already knew about the congressman's cruelty
But will there be fewer of those atrocities if Trump gets back in office? Is America going to become less hateful? How can we say we’re on the side of the downtrodden and vulnerable and then stand back and not do the one thing that would prevent Trump from implementing his evil plan to deport everyone he doesn’t like?
Being a sanctimonious scold who is always sure of the right thing to do is kind of my thing, but it’s because I want to believe that there is always a right thing to be done in any given situation. But the truth is that, often you’re just doing the less-bad thing. No matter what you do, you’re complicit in someone’s suffering — from the children who mine the materials that make your phones, to the people burning alive in a hospital attacked by weapons your tax dollars paid for, to the people in your neighborhood who fear every time you call the cops. You could even argue that vegans are complicit in the exploitation of farm workers.
This is hell. It’s just unevenly distributed.
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It’s really hard, most of the time, to make clean moral decisions about who to vote for. I am deeply concerned about sending a person who pleaded guilty to misusing taxpayer funds to D.C., and in a perfect world, I would not vote for that person. But here in this mess? She’s clearly the better option.
When I early voted, the only candidate I enthusiastically voted for was Gloria Johnson. In every other race, I was just voting against some dumbass who isn’t just complicit with evil, but openly supportive of it. Will it matter? Probably not. Not in this state anyway.
Still, even if I’m frustrated by my choices, at least I still have the choices. And if we want it to stay that way, we have to get out there and vote for the lesser of two evils.
