A week from now we will (hopefully) know who the next President of the United States will be. And between now and Tuesday everyone reading this will be inundated with an avalanche of information with the dual (and occasionally overlapping) purposes of either informing you of choices others have made or influencing/reinforcing/swaying the decision you haven't yet made.
This will (mostly) not be that.
Instead, I will tell you about the choice I've made, and why I decided to make it.
I imagine it's not much of a surprise to learn that I plan on voting for Hillary Clinton next week. I haven't necessarily been #WithHer, but I have been consistently anti-Trump for as long as he's been a viable candidate. I do not — as many extremely intelligent and thoughtful and progressive people I genuinely respect happen to believe — believe Hillary represents the lesser of two evils. I believe she's flawed, hawkish, and can be ruthless. And I'm very well aware she's done her fair share of racial (and racist) dog-whistling. And worse. I also believe she's competent. In both good and bad ways. I believe she's insanely qualified for this position. I believe she has grown. Whether that growth is politically motivated or not doesn't matter much to me. I just care that it exists. And I believe she's a fucking adult.
But this isn't why I'm voting for her.
I'm voting for her because I do not want to live in an America where the type of people who'd fervently, dogmatically, and unconditionally support Trump — who exist so motivated by and permeated with hate and fear and loathing that they'd stand in formation behind Darth Cheeto — have a reason to be optimistic about their beliefs. I do not want these people to feel good or inspired. I do not want them to receive some type of collective psychic victory. I do not want them to experience any measure of positive reinforcement. No encouragement. No stir. No rousing. No influx of energy. No invigoration. No revitalization. No nothing besides confusion, shame, and, if the confusion and the shame isn't enough to convince them to at least consider not hating me and people who look like me and people who don't look like them, death.
Yes, you read that correctly. I want these motherfuckers to lose. And if losing what might be the last winnable election for them in a millennia isn't enough for them to move into the 21st century, I wouldn't terribly mind if they withered the fuck away and died.
I'll even write them a card. And the card will say "Thank you."