Last night I donated to the Hillary Clinton campaign. Making political donations is not something I do often, or lightly. As I’ve written earlier, I’m trying to keep a close eye on my finances so as to get my debt under control and start saving for retirement. But this election feels more important, and thus more stressful, than any of those I can remember in my life thus far.
I am a straight, white, middle-class male, with full-time employment, able to afford my own place to live, food, and a certain degree of comfort and entertainment. Yes, I still worry about money, but really, I personally am highly unlikely to be directly affected by any governmental policy that comes out of the next four years.
Why, then, am I so concerned about the outcome of the next six and a half weeks? Because it’s about everyone else. It’s about who we are as a country. There was a running joke in my AP Humanities class back in high school that every culture’s rise in greatness was paralleled by a rise of the middle class. Well, we are at a turning point here. On the one hand, we can elect a reality TV plutocrat, who has tied himself to outright racist and hateful ideologies, and thus continue to oppress minorities and concentrate wealth in the hands of a mighty few, leading to our own collapse into mediocrity if not outright destruction. Or we can say no, we are better than this.
I may not agree with the entirety of Clinton’s platform. As someone with ties to the technology field, I am quite disappointed with how she’s handled her information infrastructure in the past, and look forward to the day when someone who grew up with the Internet and information technology as an integrated part of their lives is a viable candidate. I certainly don’t agree with her hawkish foreign policy stance or ties to the banking industry. But in these ways, Trump would be far worse.
I know some people I know would ask, why not vote for a third option? Because that’s not what this is about. We need to prove that we as a nation will have nothing to do with the hatred and bigotry that Trump advocates. To quote Wil Wheaton, “Trump has to be defeated in an historical landslide. He needs to be humiliated, and he needs to take as much of his party down with him as possible.”