Wednesday, November 11, 2020

African Grief on an American Ballot

So we all know the Kubler-Ross 5 stages of grief-- shock/denial, anger, bargaining, grief/depression, acceptance. In politics, seeing people get stuck at denial can be unintentionally hilarious. Just read their timelines. That happens when you are not prepared to lose.

The first night of counting votes when I saw Republicans leading, I skipped right to grief where I nursed my wounds for 5 seconds and went to bed in total acceptance. I was ready for four more years of what Stacy Abrams called "the Orange menace of putrescence". Giiirl! Well, by morning, millions of early voters' ballots which are usually counted last turned the tide. MAGAnazis went nuts. Denial hit them like a hurricane.

To be fair, you also know those in denial need to go through their schtick-- rant and rave and poke gloating eyes with pitch forks and file every law suit possible. Everything legally acceptable is their right to test. This is a great stress test for a democracy that actually needs it. It can either break the system of build it stronger.

Glitches that used to be too inconsequential to worry about could be fixed. Like how often to purge voter rolls of dead voters. One can vote today and die tomorrow. Happens many times when millions of people vote.

I look forward to seeing all these other claims of fraud. I've worked the polls through three elections, which entails going through thorough training on the system in my State, and I know one thing: You don't rig American elections at the ballot. It's stupid. You will get caught. You will go to jail. I'll talk about how American voting system gets rigged in a minute.

First, this part here is especially for Kenyans who say they have no doubt rigging happened if so many people voted early. They're seeing things through the lens of Kenyan elections where a ballot box changing hands even once is sure to be disappeared or quadrupled and someone gets killed along the way as numbers get cooked in realtime.

So dear Kenyans: Manual or electronic, the voting systems in the US is awesomely water-tight. Cases of illegal voting are usually mistakes, like voting absentee and deciding to still go and vote again in person because you aren't sure if your vote was received. Usually you will get a notification, and the voter rolls will indicate you voted already. A resident status person thinking they have a right to vote can also attempt to do so. They won't get far.

You could try to use a dead person's name but when you go to vote you have to prove you are that dead person. Even in States where IDs are not required, you have to recite the dead person's address, age and the elections official has to look at you and determine you're telling the truth.

At our precinct some years back, so the story was told, a man tried to do exactly that, but he was much younger than the dead person. So the election official called the elections judge, and at that point the would-be voter ran away. Elections crimes in all states are serious. That's why these cases amount to a negligible 0.0025%.

So I can't wait to see the evidence the Republicans present. I want to see what fools these are who manufactured thousands of ballots out of thin air at 4am and brought them in full view of observers. And other imagined schemes. It's laughable, but let the courts hear them out. Please note that these courts are packed with Republican judges. This will be fun.

So here's how American elections are rigged. It's done between election cycles through gerrymandering and voter suppression. That's where you create rules and regulations through the legal system to make it very difficult for a group of people to vote. Google Operation Eagle Eye as an example. It was a Republican voter-suppression hit job.

There are many others through the years, especially against black people. Voter suppression is an ever-present reality in the US. That's why fighting for voting rights is always a continuous exercise. Remember the most recent voter suppression was when the current president tried to cripple the Post Office to reduce the number of early voters. That failed spectacularly. Early voters turned up in droves.

Back to Kubler-Ross's cycle of grief and ridiculous sorrows. All you going through the stage of denial in this political drama, you'd do well to not get stuck there. Especially you Nigerian and Kenyan ultra-White evangelicals, mostly Nigeria-- y'all even had a street parade for someone who called your country a shithole. It was a wretched and pitiful sight. You coiled your African tails and accepted you are shit, in your words "he spoke the truth".

Listen here. If an American president uttered an anti-Semitic slur, watch the wrath of all Jews across the globe descend on him, and rightly so. If a famous person publicly called African Americans the n-word, said person's career would come to a screeching halt in a second, and rightly so. That's because these labels come from a history of subjugation and indignity.

But you African groveling in the putrescence of an American strongman, when do you learn to stand up for your dignity? You whitened African evangelicals. I know your mother's village, but you sound like you come from bible-belt Mississippi with your American white evangelicalism that quite frankly still thinks of you as a slave, at best a cleaned-up ape. Please, do not to go on a pilgrimage to Paula White's birth place. The Klansmen will hang you from a poplar tree.

Cross-breeding spiritualities can produce grotesque results in an individual. We children of colonization's mind-capture understand this fact with great empathy. Tell you what, if you must do Jesus, stick to the revolutionary compassionate Jesus of two loaves and five fishes. I like that one. The white evangelical one you have embraced is weaponized against you. Remember that.
A grotesque face that to me represents the results of blended spiritualities against self. *Artist: A Basquiat perhaps?