The Day Before the Election, 2020

I am recycling what I wrote to my soon-to-be ex-husband in England, after some simple chat and inquiring about conditions there. We lived, and he still lives, in Hinckley, Leics, a medium-sized town 12 miles southwest of Leicester, which was England’s worst COVID hotspot. The UK just went into a hard lockdown which is expected to last at least until January.

Here’s what I wrote:

We are battening down the hatches here. When I say “we” I mean the left, and my organization Twin Cities DSA, and the couple 100 people, mostly millennials, that I didn’t know three years ago and am now best friends with. My life is exhausting and exciting at the same time and I occasionally wonder why I’m still alive! Oh, dear, and one of my friends from Atlanta, Eric’s other ex-wife Jonnie, who was stepmother to Carey, just died in her sleep from a heart attack. She had just turned 69 in September. I’m going to be 68 in four days. And so it goes.

I have dark premonitions about this election. The left is all “how can we prevent Trump from stealing the election?” and for all the planning, poll defense, community defense, anti-fascist organizing, no one has stopped to consider what the hell they’re going to do if and when Trump wins outright with a clear majority of the popular vote. Consider — Trump has rallies with 25,000 attendees, he leaves them stranded in a remote field in freezing weather for several hours after he leaves, and none of them are even mad at him. Biden can’t even get 1,000 even with an Obama on the platform. What are my dear comrades thinking? Is wishful thinking so powerful that it blinds them to the bleeding obvious? Nobody has ever been excited about Joe Biden. He’s not exciting, he’s not even a good candidate. Trump is either loathed or adored. I loathe him, but I can see that he’s exciting a lot of people. In a second term, he is going to be flat out Hitler. Activists will be disappeared, “problem” neighborhoods will be firebombed, the ICE facilities will become straightforward death camps.