WASHINGTON — It’s here. All the talking is done. We are one day away from what may be noted in the future as one of our nation’s most important elections.
Through this election cycle, we’ve seen the best of most of our fellow citizens. With the end of early voting, we’ve seen over 90 million ballots cast. Already more than half the total number of votes from four years ago, and we still have tomorrow to go.
We voted by mail. We dropped off ballots at designated locations. We stood in lines long enough to warrant bringing chairs and snacks. And we didn’t let anything turn us around. Neither the heat in some places nor the cold in others. Not rain, nor a pandemic. We showed up, and we showed out. Filling me up with glowing pride.
But this election cycle also showed us the worst in a minority of our fellow citizens, filling me with dull anger. This past weekend alone, we’ve seen incidents and tactics that could have come directly out of the civil rights rallies and marches of our past.
In North Carolina, citizens walking to the polls, including children and the elderly, were pepper-sprayed and arrested after stopping in a moment of silence for a murdered man. In Texas, the Republican party requested to have over 100,000 ballots cast through curbside voting thrown out. Disenfranchising citizens who had already voted in good faith. Thankfully, the request was rejected by the state supreme court. On a Texas highway, a caravan of truck driving Trump supporters, allegedly armed, harassed a Biden/Harris bus heading to a campaign event. Driving slowly and surrounding it in what looked to be an attempt to run it off the road, putting lives at risk. The incident was defended by our president.
And that's just what I have time to document here.
We are standing at the top of two divergent paths. One leads in the direction of a majority united in cooperation and a desire to seek an understanding of one another--attributes that have been in short supply these last years. The other, a dark one, ruled over by an angry, fear-filled minority.
The results of tomorrow's elections will start us down one of these paths. Which will it be? It's up to you to decide--vote.