The 2020 Presidential Election is full of groundbreaking firsts. For the first time, a woman now holds the title of vice-president, and the elected President, Joe Biden, received more votes than any other president in United States history. With all of these achievements, how can we still look at this election with such melancholy? The truth is, we didn’t want Biden, but we couldn’t stand another four years with Donald Trump.
As a twenty-year-old woman living in NYC, I saw Elizabeth Warren speak live in a Brooklyn theatre and immediately fell in love. I loved her confidence, passion, intellect, and those statement cardigans. She was the “bossy girl” I wanted in the White House, and when she ended her campaign I cried. When Biden was elected as the primary candidate I wanted to cry. However, nothing made me more emotional than the thought of Trump having another term. This might sound ridiculous, a young woman crying over the president of the United States. However, I wept at the thought of another four years of the deep political divide, four more years of minorities not being viewed as human beings by our president, and four more years in fear that the people I love will be stripped of their rights.
Biden is not the answer-- I think everyone in America who voted blue knows that. He is not the saving grace of this broken country, but Biden is one step closer to the changes my generation hopes to see. Joseph Biden holds a terrible past full of racism, compliance to unethical decisions, and so does Vice-President Kamala Harris (for greater detail of their misgivings, I will write more about that in next week’s blog). So how can we ethically vote for Biden/Harris when their past is hypocritical to the society we hope to help them create during their term? First, we must hold them accountable as members of the political community. Make them uneasy. Make them reflect. On their first day in office, they have to admit to their transgressions, and as citizens who voted for them, we must not allow them to ignore their past. We must (loudly) encourage them to make policies to dismantle the systematic racism they contributed to. In other words, we’ve got work to do.
Republicans will look at this blog and ask “why couldn’t we do this with Trump?” The answer is simple: Trump blatantly denies systematic racism and for the past four years has done everything in his power to dismantle basic human rights for minorities and the LGBTQ+ community. Again, I will cover the disaster of Trump’s presidency and the widespread hate he has exacerbated among the nation in another blog post(s). The American people cannot beg an elected official for change that he does not or chooses not to believe in and, it is not our job to educate him to do so.
Therefore, Biden may not be the one we wanted, but he is the one we needed. Biden claims that he will be a president “for all Americans” and that is the optimism we need within the next four years. The next four years will be something full of highs and lows, full of disappointments and hard conversations, but for now, we can say we voted a white supremacist out of office.
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