For many of us here in Vermont, the decision to support Bernie Sanders for president of the United States was rooted in deep social-justice convictions, but not necessarily in the realities of our lives.
Except perhaps for women - who understand on a daily, personal level the consequences of continuing to let men rule - most of us made the choice based on our belief system, not because of any immediate threat to our lives, our families or our communities.
For feminists especially, this has been a frustrating and difficult choice between a pro-peace, progressive man whose campaign rested on dismantling a corrupt system and a pro-war woman whose politics are moderate Republican and whose campaign depends on preserving the corrupt system.
Now the choice is between a candidate who will maintain the status quo and a candidate who reminds much of the world of an extraordinarily crude and far-more-powerful Adolf Hitler. The choice is clearly between sanity and Armageddon.
But our version of “sanity” is, in fact, Armageddon for many others, and the choice between these two candidates is a choice between which group of people we're willing to sacrifice.
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A video from the Democratic National Convention making the rounds on Facebook brought this latter point home to me. For this unnamed woman, passionate and enraged, the decision to support Bernie was rooted in basic survival: voting for Hillary means maintaining the status quo, means her grandchildren, her community, her whole world will continue to be devastated by the environmental and economic destruction imposed on her state by powerful energy corporations, the Wall Streeters who bankroll them, and the corrupt politicians who protect the status quo.
For us, the issues of fracking, long-wall mining, and mountaintop removal are distant; they are matters of principle. For her, it's life and death.
If you lived through Tropical Storm Irene, you have some inkling of what these communities experience. Only those communities aren't going to recover; the devastation by these energy corporations is ongoing and permanent.
And it's not just a handful of communities: It's corporate control of entire states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, and Kentucky. Entire communities whose people lose their homes to shifting, broken foundations, lose their towns to massive mudslides, watch their drinking water catch fire or poison their children to death.
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For tens of thousands of people like that woman, there is no difference between Clinton or Trump; either way, King Energy and the Wall Street banks control their lives. She and her community face the same annihilation.
Choose Trump, and we likely condemn the lives of virtually all people of color, because scapegoating “Mexicans,” “Arabs,” or any other “foreigners” always results in discrimination, assaults, and murders of all people of color. After all, we do not live in a country sophisticated, enlightened or educated enough to know the difference between a Middle Easterner and a Brazilian, much less a feminist Muslim scholar or a right-wing ISIS operative.
Choose Hillary Clinton, and be assured that racial profiling, stop-and-frisk policies, Jim Crow policing, and the murders of unarmed Black lives will continue unabated. After all, it was she and Bill who lobbied hard to pass the draconian drugs laws that target communities of color, to fund the militarization of police forces, to privatize prisons and turn them into prison labor hell-holes that benefit corporate America.
Choose Trump, and women's rights will continue to be eroded and controlled by hate-filled bigots whose extreme religious views on reproductive injustice are codified into laws across this god-fearing, theocratic nation. Choose Trump, and the bullies who target women with endless hate crimes will escalate their war against women and our right to exist in the public space.
Choose Clinton, and hope she doesn't stay true to her anti-abortion religious convictions. Choose her, and hope she doesn't continue to devastate working-class mothers with cutbacks in health care of any kind; trade policies that favor corporations and impoverish workers; wars that divert public funding from social services, education, and reproductive services for women; wars that slaughter mothers and their children overseas.
Choose Trump, and watch civil liberties fade in a series of staged state-of-emergency “terrorist” attacks.
But choose Clinton, and watch civil liberties continue to remain elusive and realistically suspended for people of color, for working-class people lost in our prison-industrial complex, for left-wing activists, environmentalists, and anyone deemed to be a “terrorist.”
Choose Clinton, and watch the War on Terror continue unabated, and the pATRIOT Act expand unchecked.
Choose Trump or Clinton, and any hope dies for dismantling the stranglehold that the medical-industrial system holds on our nation, along with the thousands who die every year from our disastrous “health care” system.
Choose either, and the unchecked, massive profiteering by the medical insurance industry will continue to bankrupt, make homeless, and destroy entire families.
Choose Clinton or Trump, and Mother Nature still has little hope for withstanding the ongoing annihilation of her oceans, her lands, her air - or little hope for entire species facing elimination.
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No matter what temporary campaign rhetoric either candidate spouts, neither candidate represents the 99 percent.
One candidate is adept at building endless firewalls to prevent democracy from getting into the halls of power, and the other candidate is adept at stealing wealth through bullying, misdirection, and con games. But both are products and proponents of a corrupt, corporate system that exploits on a massive, global scale in order to enrich a tiny elite.
The truth is that whichever choice we make in November, it will have devastating and disastrous results for someone, for huge numbers of someones.
The consequences of spending decades squandering our political power on lesser-of-two-evil candidates, of not building a viable progressive alternative, has brought us to this lousy end.
No matter which of those two you vote for, you will be condemning some group of people, some portion of our planet, some future hope, to death.
At the very least, don't condemn those who refuse to give up their principles to make that lousy choice.