Deja hue…the orange demon is back!

If you’re a Democrat or progressive who voted for Harris, your worst fear has come to pass. T-Rump will soon be comfortably ensconced in the White House, where he will eagerly set to work reversing all the gains of the Biden presidency. 

Oh wait, there weren’t any…unless you’re a fan of wars, genocide, ecocide, and rampant inflation.

But what, if anything, have you learned from the looming disaster known as Trump 2.0? Specifically, can you admit, even to yourself, that you wasted your vote? 

My guess is a big fat NO. 

But if you are in broad agreement with the Green Party platform (peace, grassroots democracy, free speech, social justice, environmental stewardship, etc.) and yet voted for Kamala Harris, then you did indeed waste your vote. You turned your back on your professed values and voted for a candidate who is the very definition of an empty suit, a candidate nominated by political hacks doing the will of  billionaires, a candidate who ran as a cipher, never putting forth a vision of how she would change the U.S. for the better (because she didn’t have one).

You could have sent a message to the Democrats that they don’t OWN your vote…they have to earn it. (But let’s get real…since they work for the billionaire class, that’s not going to happen.) 

You could have sent a message to other like-minded voters that it’s OK to vote your hopes rather than your fears, so that maybe next time they wouldn’t railroad themselves into believing their only choice is between two genocidal psychopaths.

And you could have gone to sleep tonight knowing you didn’t vote for a candidate who supports the wholesale slaughter of innocent men, women, and children. (Would you have voted for Harris if it were YOUR family being shot, bombed, and starved?)

Instead, you voted for the supposed “lesser of two evils”, thus setting the stage for a replay of this farce four years down the road. But it’s not the lesser of two evils, it’s the evil of two lessers, and with each election cycle over the last several decades, the choices offered by the Democratic and Republican parties have only gotten worse. This is a direct result of that lesser evil game you’ve been playing.

If you vote for a candidate whose policies are antithetical to your values, have you actually voted? (Answer: No.) 

Isn’t it long past time you stopped voting for evil? (Answer: Yes.) 

Do you really want to look back on your political choices and realize that not once did you vote for a candidate who didn’t make you feel secretly ashamed that you voted for them? (Answer: No.)

Next time around, don’t waste your vote. Vote your heart, vote your values…vote Green. 

But you don’t have to wait four years. You can combat the anticipated evils of T-Rump, not by wearing a pink pussy hat and badmouthing Putin; that is, not by continuing to follow the loser Democrats, but by stepping up, joining the Greens and beginning to build a country you believe in and deserve.

Wilton Vought is a retired small business owner (health food store, used book store, and freelance videographer), who now devotes his energies to being a full-time troublemaker with a weekly radio show (Essential Dissent) on WBDY-LP in Binghamton.