ANOTHER TERM OF TRUMP TOO MUCH TO BEAR
When you go to vote in the Queensland election today, savour the sane selection of leaders offered just as much as that barbecue snag.
IT’S October 31 and I am absolutely terrified.
Not because it’s Halloween … but because of the election.
Not the Queensland election … but THE election. Biden versus Trump. Good versus evil.
There are just days to go, yet no one can predict whether we are in for a trick or in for a treat.
Yet I’m doing my absolute best to save the world, one vote at a time. It’s just another perk of being a true-blue dual national.
While I’m set to enjoy a delicious democracy sausage at my local polling booth on Saturday, I have already exercised my voting rights in the country of my birth.
Despite Mr Trump’s attempts to invalidate my mail-in vote, I have managed to successfully stand up and be counted in what is considered to be the most important election in US history.
After all, what price democracy? (The answer is actually $33, the cost of registered express post from Mermaid Beach to the Dallas County electoral office.)
It is the very least I can do after the past four years that have felt like I am living in the Upside Down.
It’s no exaggeration to say that every single morning since November 2016, the very first thing I do is grab my phone and see if Donald Trump has yet been dumped. I don’t know how it would happen, I just know that every day I pray that it has … and every morning I am disappointed.
Four years ago, my family and I were living in Texas, in the midst of a midlife lifebreak. We spent seven months living large in the land of the super-sized and loving every minute. Until the morning of November 9.
That was the morning I picked up my phone and my worst fears were realised: Donald Trump was the next President of the United States of America.
I am not a crier, but that day I bawled for hours. It wasn’t that my team had lost, but that my countrymen had been fooled. Or worse, had allowed their basest instincts to overrule their intrinsic humanity.
I have tried to reconcile myself to America’s fate, I really have. I am an eternal optimist. Just like Monty Python’s Brian, I am always looking on the bright side of life, but ever since 2016 I have experienced a true sense of despondency.
I remember a close friend, a supporter of Trump no less, consoling me after the result was official, saying that she too had been depressed after Obama won – but eight years later, it was nowhere near as bad as she had feared.
She reassured me that come 2020, I would feel the same – that the reality would be nowhere as bad as my darkest imaginings. And she was correct.
It’s far, far worse.
My fellow Australians, I am begging you to have some empathy for Americans.
To those of you who find Trump entertaining or who consider his political incorrectness as “refreshing’’ (FYI it’s actually called racism) or who simply enjoy the schadenfreude of watching the self-proclaimed greatest country in the world eat itself alive, please have a heart.
You don’t know what it’s like.
There are a quarter million of my American family dead just this year.
My sister in San Francisco has an infected, inflamed heart seven months after catching COVID in March and struggles to look after her son. My nephews on the east coast have been harassed by police for protesting against racism while their friends – people of colour – have been arrested for the skin they’re in.
But worse than any of this is just watching the hatred of brother versus brother unfold daily, whether online or on the streets of the States.
This is not the country I was born in. This is not even the country I lived in four years ago. This is a country “ruled’’ by Trump. This is a country that has been incited to new heights of hatred and whose most extreme citizens have been called to action by the dog whistling of their leader. It’s not fun and it’s not funny.
For those who insist on praising Trump’s questionable “achievements’’, whether economic or political, know that every one of those “wins’’ has come at the cost of losing another piece of the country’s soul. This is not a good man. And the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
Australia, this is not your fight … but this country too can end up the loser. In the battle royale shaping up between China and the USA, we need a rational leader to take America back to the top and away from the brink.
So Australians, please have some respect.
When you go to vote in the Queensland election today, savour the sane selection of leaders offered just as much as that barbecue snag.
Sure, we have some weirdos – and worse – on the list, but isn’t it a credit to our country and our state that they are never more than an aberration, rather than an actual assault to our democracy?
This Halloween, appreciate the very real treat of living in the land down under, and pray that the people of America don’t get tricked again.
My fellow Australians, I am begging you to have some empathy for Americans.