It's not that simple...

I've got a set of three blog posts bottled up that are related to our upcoming election in the United States, but I'd prefer to keep them all as non-partisan as I can. I don't mind sharing my views (feel free to ask--some of them will probably be easy to discern anyway), but I'm actually sort of sick of seeing the partisan fighting, and so I'm going to try doing what I've been told is always a good idea in writing: writing the blog post(s) I wish I could read right now.

Last night I listened to a panel discussion from three well-respected and fairly impressive journalists that I thought was supposed to be about race and democracy. To be fair, they did address that topic somewhat, and I appreciated some of the points they made. However, an awful lot of the panel discussion ended up being a rant (from all three of them) against a particular candidate. And this ranting was (mostly) on-topic, and for the most part I felt like what they said was fair, so I mostly tried to shrug it off. That wasn't too hard because I generally agreed with them. 

But then they went too far. They started saying that if, for any reason, an individual decided to vote for the candidate they were blasting, that voter has relinquished their ability to consider themselves anti-racist now or in the future, as well as their ability to support people of color in any way. They even went a step further and said that if you vote for this candidate--and they were actually responding to a question from a real person, mind you, not just a moderator question--you can't be friends with people of color. Wow. WOW. Seriously? There can't possibly be any other considerations that a person might have in making that decision? This election is all about one issue? Don't get me wrong, I actually agree with a lot of the other things they said last night. I'm on the same page regarding that candidate, and did vote for a different one. I do think that the problems surrounding race in our country are very important, and that is one of the big issues for me on the table right now for this election. But I still disagree with their claims.

Single issue candidates don't exist, and anyone who tells you otherwise has something to gain from it, or thinks they do. Choices in U.S. politics are hard, and they have consequences. Our system is set up such that it almost always ends up being a binary vote, when most policy issues are far from binary. So I'll disagree with anyone who claims that the answer (on this or any issue) is obvious or clear cut. I'll disagree with them about that even if I generally agree with them on the issue. The choices aren't easy or obvious or we would all agree.

That's my position. This is a hard choice. I hope that everyone makes an informed one. And if you decide your "most important issue" is different than the issue(s) that I chose in making my decision, that's cool. I hope we can still be friends. Please believe the best of me anyway, and I will do the same for you.