Would you vote to stop Trump? Of course for many of the members of this site and people of good concience the answer is obvious. However in the heat of a primary people say things that are worrying. The idea that should your candidate not win you would sit out the election or that a victory for the extreme right in America would hasten the peoples revolution is dangerous...especially this year.
Some background: I joined this site in 2004 as a Brit who was a student of American politics, as a muslim in a post 9/11 world and as someone who wanted somewhere to discuss the coming Kerry landslide that would show the world that everything I knew to be true about America was about to be proved by their sweeping away of the Bush presidency. I was 22 and naive. The Daily Kos became somewhere after that election in November that I felt safe, a place whose members reminded me of why I love America and Americans. I posted lightly but was always reading. Skip forward a few years and the primary battle erupted between Clinton and Obama. Of course I should have been an Obama supporter but everything I learned in that 2004 race had made me jaded. I know I wasn't alone after 2004 in actually suffering the black dogs as a result of what occurred. I found it hard to accept that the same country could elect a man whose middle name was Hussein, so I supported HRC, someone whom I had admired since I was a teenager. The battle on this site was ferocious, my mojo has never recovered! Comically I look back and remember why i was doughnuted to hell. It was after a post by Kos, similar to the one he made this morning but back then it was something I didn't want to hear about HRC. Mine was the first comment on that thread, in the days before the auto tip jar, my comment was simply “Asshole”...lol, i left and went to MYDD...LOL. Things came right at the end of 2008, the right man won, history’s man won, and he presided over a presidency that makes me emotional to think about to this day, the front page of the Chicago Sun Times from both post election mornings hang on the wall of my flat in London.
This is a long way to say I am invested in the outcomes of your elections and not from a bystanders point of view, but from the view of someone who has longed to actually be an American.
I have travelled to more than 30 states, I worked for a year helping defend death row inmates in North Carolina, I knocked doors in 2012. Every chance I get I travel across the pond.
Even as it has got harder to travel as a single brown man with a name like mine it has never deterred me, even when the TSA has flagged me so I get extra security when I board a flight it hasn't angered me, because I have been able to stand on a cliff edge of the Oregon coast and be brought to tears by the beauty of this country I love.
I have been able to run around Green Lake in Seattle visiting my family who have moved there, people who make the long distance travel irrelevant, people who I love very dearly. People without whom my life would be inconceivable.
I have been blind drunk thanks to my New Yorker and San Franciscan friends who go out of their way to show me much love when ever I visit, people who I can't bare the thought of not having in my life.
I will never forget seeing Joe Biden on an Amtrak platform in Delaware as i rode the rails to the South, or the kindness shown to me by people with nothing in the poorest parts of Winston-Salem.
I have fallen in and out of love in San Fransisco. I truly found myself (after a very long search) in California.
These have been the times of my life for over more than half of it.
While Europe has made me feel unwanted and the city of my birth has been handed to the souless I found great solace in the wide open spaces of the heartlands. While the political systems of my country made me devoid of hope I looked to a skinny black man with a funny name and found it again.
The idea that I may lose my ability to continue to see this, to continue to feel what it makes me feel has never crossed my mind, until this year.
Take Trump at his word, people like me will be banned from entering the USA. If Europe has taught me anything it is that these people mean what they say. It may sound like hyperbole from him but my own family has experienced the harsh realities of strong men when they were forced to flee Uganda in 1972. These people mean what they say.
When you find yourself emotionally charged in this primary and you say things like “I don't know if I can vote for [Democrat X] in the fall” please know what this sounds like to those of us without a say but with a lot to lose.
This is a selfish diary, I am aware, this has been about me, but everyday I think of all the families like mine, all the people like me and then I remember who it will be even worse for. The people who are going to be dragged out of bed in the night and thrown over Trumps wall like my family were pushed at gunpoint out of their homes.
I just wanted you guys on this site, which has been important to me for 12 years now to know from one long time Kossack to all of you my friends that what is at stake in this election is truly greater than any desire for purity can possibly be.
All of you have legitimate policy differences and I don't make any comment as to those, you are thinking of your families and friends when you make those arguments, but when you get to that moment when you feel like driving the car off the cliff and sitting it out please just remember our families too. Whoever is the Democratic nominee whether it be that glorious rebel who will transform America or that hard fighting lady who will ensure the centre holds, please think on how dark the world has become and remember what your country means to some of us who aren't there.
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