Clinton Fans, Stop Angst-ing

by MISSY COMLEY BEATTIE

I have a visceral reaction when you suggest I reconsider my position and get my “butt back to North Carolina and vote for Hillary.”

I’d sever my hand at the wrist if I felt the slightest inclination to compromise my conscience and vote for a mass murderer.

Glen Ford, executive editor of Black Agenda Report, said “Hillary Clinton represents the greatest threat to life on Earth at this moment.”

I take issue with Ford on this. Just slightly though. I’ve written that the gravest threat to our planet is climate change. We are galloping at an unprecedented rate towards the Sixth Extinction, one that’s human-induced.

So … Clinton is the second greatest threat to life on Earth with her No-Fly-Zone over Syria and antagonist rhetoric directed at Putin. Russian intervention in Syria is motivated not by a chummy relationship between Assad and Putin but by Putin’s grasp of U.S. Empire’s insatiable appetite for supremacy. He’s protecting his country.

I see Clinton’s itchy, trigger-happy fingers primed to enter the nuclear launch codes. BOOM: mushroom clouds over Russian cities. Russia retaliates, striking NYC. Striking other U.S. metropolitan areas or arsenal locations. Yes, this is grave. You may think this is more serious than climate change. That the use of nuclear weapons would wipe out humanity. It wouldn’t. Hit Google for the science. Okay, now I’m wavering, but not about the presidential election. Maybe Ford is right. Or maybe it’s a tie. Hillary Clinton ties with climate change as the greatest threat to life on Earth at this moment.

Let’s consider that we don’t know Trump’s capacity for destruction. However, we’ve heard his racist comments, are aware of the allegations of sexual predation. Whoa, I’m having another visual: Trump’s tongue invading a non-participatory woman’s throat. Invading, invading, invasions, regime change—and I’m detouring to an image accompanied by sound: HRC’s cackling when Muammar al-Gaddafi was sodomized, slaughtered.

Meanwhile, Trump’s operatives are controlling damage (as I write) after a newspaper affiliated with the KKK endorsed him.

A CNN poll indicating that the race is tightening is bullshit—bait to lure you to vote. The count is of utmost importance in continuing the mythology that “your vote is your voice” and that this is democracy. It’s all about the count, but you don’t count. You are inconsequential. Look, the Deciders don’t give an ant’s ass about you, don’t care about your needs, your values, your health, the circumstances of your life, the circumstances of your death.

Soon there will be a new U.S. Ogre-in-Chief. The POTUS will not be the pussy grabber. The POTUS will be the money grubber. And she will make Obama look like a Nobel Peace Prize recipient. HEH.

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Missy Beattie has written for National Public Radio and Nashville Life Magazine. She was an instructor of memoirs writing at Johns Hopkins’ Osher Lifelong Learning Institute in Baltimore. Email: missybeat@gmail.com

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/11/04/clinton-fans-stop-angst-ing/