Let’s Roll…It’s Time to Vote
My Aunt Pat and Aunt Jane became American heroes that day, martyred for the cause of democracy on Flight 93.
Ronald Reagan won the Cold War. Or at least that’s how it played out on the evening news when I was growing up in the 1980s. The Soviet Union was dissolved with the stroke of a pen, and Russia — or as we called them back then, “the Russians” — simply complied. The era of nervous nuclear tension, strung like a tightly-tuned piano wire across the globe, went limp and the United States took its place as the sole superpower that would lead the world in military, economic, technological, and social dominance.
And then we had 9–11. A rag-tag group of rebel militants took down icons of US economic and military dominance as they struck the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., killing nearly 3,000 people. A fourth plane was headed for the Capitol (or perhaps the White House) when the passengers on board, knowing that the previous three planes had hit high profile targets, decided in a sacrificial act of human courage to take that plane down in a field in the middle of Pennsylvania, no doubt saving hundreds if not thousands of lives. My Aunt Pat and Aunt Jane became American heroes that day, martyred for the cause of democracy on Flight 93.
We are currently in the midst of another hijacking, cleverly designed to take down the United States. Just as the loosely allied radical factions that made up Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda in 2001 took four perfectly good planes and turned them into weapons of mass destruction, the losers of the Cold War have hijacked a perfectly good institution — the US presidency — with the goal of showing the world that the US isn’t so powerful, smart, rich, and righteous.
In a thirty year campaign to dismantle US world dominance, “The Russians” have calculated well. Unable to meet our military and economic might head on, Putin’s Russia has infiltrated our political system to the highest office in the land. Simultaneously, seeing racial injustice as our Achilles heel, they’ve indiscriminately stoked existing racism and its vehement antiracist response in order to multiply social upheaval exponentially in the polarization equation. And the regional differences that span our vast sea-to-shining-sea geography are easy pickings, dividing rural Americans from residents of its populous cities and pitting northerners and southerners against one another as if the US Civil War never ended.
When you pull on the loose threads of the United States’ political unraveling, many of those threads lead straight back to the Russian disinformation campaigns that began decades ago as nothing more than laughable nose-thumbing from our former super-enemy. But those campaigns never went away. They just got better and better at what they’re intended to do, employing thousands of Russians in promulgating disinformation and, now, successfully engaging innumerable Americans of all persuasions in a partisan rift that leaves us wondering what hit us. The next time you see Putin’s smirking face in the news, ask yourself who’s laughing now.
Whatever your political affiliation may be, it’s time to realize that the voters of the United States need to snap out of the spell of partisan politics that threatens to tear us apart. We have been hijacked. We need to splash cold water on our face, look in the mirror, and remember who we are. I marvel at the way the passengers on Flight 93 were able to see what was happening in real time and make their move, effectively hijacking the hijackers’ plan while sacrificing their own lives for the greater good.
In the upcoming 2020 election, you may need to cast a vote for someone whose policies you don’t like. You may need to vote for a party you never saw yourself voting for. You may need to swallow your pride and privately realize you’ve been duped. I’m not mentioning any names here. Let your conscience fill in the blanks.
So, as we head to the polling stations, my fellow Americans, as we work to get #allsoulstothepolls, let’s think of the bravery displayed on Flight 93. The Russians want to hijack this election. We can’t let them do that. Let’s roll…
— by Emily Bruce
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