John Pavlovitz’s reflection is one that may interest you if you’ve been paying attention to recent news as regards our big umbrella of Democratic voters and the 2024 presidential election.

Excerpts follow: Read or Listen to The Beautiful Mess, 5/14/24, by John Pavlovitz at: https://johnpavlovitz.substack.com/p/not-voting-for-joe-biden-isnt-penalizing

“Right now a disturbing fiction is taking hold in many progressives and moderates, especially younger voters: the idea that rejecting President Biden in November is a way of hurting him personally; that abstaining or protest voting is an effective personal penalty for what they believe is his mishandling of the deadly crisis in the Middle East (one that began decades ago and that will surely outlive us). They see their vote (or their lack of it) as a righteous middle finger to the current President…

…Biden’s handling of the staggering violence that has unfolded in Gaza is surely greatly flawed and far from what many of us wish to see, myself included. But the reality is that rejecting him and his party is not only a political defeat for them, it is an act of premeditated violence against the world.

Not voting for President Biden isn’t penalizing Joe Biden, it’s penalizing women, LGBTQ people, people of color, immigrants, indigenous people, Muslins, Jews, the sick, the elderly, the poor, and pretty much every person here and elsewhere who will be irreparably harmed by a second Trump term—not to mention, Democracy, America, and the planet.

It will place our present and our future in the hands of a several-times indicted, morally-inverted, court-established rapist who has stacked the Supreme and lower courts, the GOP, and local school and election boards with sycophants and surrogates; a man whose complete contempt for our Constitution and for humanity are on full display. There is no justification for willfully allowing this.

If Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans prevail in November, not only will the violence in and around Gaza continue, that violence will find in Republicans a willing and passionate accomplice. We will see an escalation of the death and destruction, not a reduction of it. The Middle East will become more volatile and unstable, not less so. And Joe Biden will not be damaged by being removed from the White House, the rest of us will be. That is the point here, one young voters may be missing in their passionate and beautiful outrage to the atrocities in Gaza.

No politician or political party will ever perfectly embody our values or respond blamelessly to the myriad of crises that present themselves. We don’t wait to vote only when we have full moral agreement with a candidate but we choose the one that shares the greatest affinity with the totality of our values. We vote, not merely intellectually and emotionally but strategically as well, wielding our collective wills like a shield against the greatest threats in front of us…

…Joe Biden is far from perfect, but we should refuse to let that reality cause us to abandon the bigger picture of our shared humanity and allow it to cause us to cut off our noses to spite our collective faces in the most important election we will ever participate in.

Donald Trump’s victory will not be a loss for Joe Biden, it will be a loss for all of us.

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