Eventhough I already voted today and feel confident about voting democratic becasue of their stance on issues that matter to me and to other people of color. I got this email today from my best friend Ken about how the vote is going down in the Southern states. I didn’t want to put my boy on blast like this but felt that it was too important to not share.
Hello, How are you on this Election Day? Are you registered to vote? I am, and I’m going to vote for Kerry when I get home from work this evening.
I talked to my mother sunday night for a minute and she got on my nerves. Evidently many black churches have instructed their members to vote for Bush because Kerry is not against gay marriage and abortion. The Republicans are attempting to use the message of Christianity to brainwash black people into thinking that voting Republican is the religiously correct thing to do because they know that most black people have christian family members, if they themselves are not christians. I think that is absolutely ridiculous.
Republicans wish to do away with welfare, social security and public housing. Republicans refuse to improve the public healthcare system for the elderly and retired, and they refuse to provide any sort of assistance to help seniors buy their expensive medications. Its gotten so bad that senior citizens are getting together and chartering buses and driving to CANADA just to buy their medication. This affects me personally beecause my grandparents who both have blood pressure and blood sugar issues complain about how high their medicine prices are getting, and how their gov’t medical assistance is barely helping out. They’re both retired and they both together barely receive enough SS to pay the mortgage and utilities and buy their meds.
Then there’s my sister who although she’s not on welfare anymore, still lives in government housing in south Georgia. Bush wants to do away with public housing and encourage everyone to buy a house because its the American Dream. Unfortunately, thats the case for many people, homeownership is only a dream. How is my sister who works at Walmart to single handedly raise her two kids gonna be able to buy a house if they decide to stop funding her subsidized apartment complex? She’s not prepared to own a house mentally or financially. Tearing down affordable housing will cause people to be homeless, not homeowners. If everybody could own a house, my guess is that they would. But that isn’t the case. There are people who haven’t yet learned financial responsibility and aren’t ready yet to own a home. Telling them to go buy a house would cause them to commit financial suicide. Many of them are are young and on their own and living in affordable housing because their families couldn’t tolerate them anymore for whatever reason, or they had a child and therefore need their own affordable space to raise that child….
Republicans are all about giving big tax breaks to the countriest richest 2% of the population and doing nothing for us. More people lost jobs under Bush’s presidency than any other presidency in history. Our economy hasn’t been this bad since Bush’s father was in office.
These are all my reasons for voting for Kerry. He is for building better affordable housing, and he’s for increasing the strength of our social security and healthcare programs. He’s concerned about the average American, the other 98% of us that Bush is trying to sweep under the carpet.
I don’t think its politically correct to vote for someone because he says he’ll be sure to stop gay people from getting married. I don’t think its fair to try to use politics to enforce your religious beliefs on an entire country. America is supposed to be the land of the free, meaning freedom of speech and freedom to worship how we please. I feel that its not within our rights to force the rest of the country to comply with the Bible no matter how strongly we believe it. That isn’t the purpose of politics or voting.
We need to realize that as black people, we are doing ourselves a disservice by voting Republican. My mother is 54 and my stepfather is 49. Neither one of them have ANY savings, or retirement plans. They live paycheck to paycheck in their 2 bedroom apartment in Georgia and continously rely on me as well as other family members to help them out when either one of their 12 and 14 yr old cars breaks down or when they need help paying an unexpected bill. They both will likely have to work for the rest of their lives because its not likely that whats left of social security will be able to fully sustain them when they’re old enough to retire in another 12 or 15 years. But they’ve foolishly decided to vote for Bush because he’ll prevent gay people from getting married.
Now just how stupid does that sound? I did not intend for this e-mail to be this long, I just started venting about what my mother said to me Sunday night. I was mostly mad because she’s so mis-informed about the presidential race and the democratic vs. republican issues in general, and she used something as stupid as gay-marriage as her reason to go to the polls and shoot herself in the foot.
Come on black people, we need to be more informed about whats going on around us. Lets not just take someone’s word for something, lets do our research and find out for ourselves. Lets vote for what matters to us. If you’re not trying to marry a member of the same sex or trying to abort a baby, why are you concerned about others doing it?? Why can’t we be concerned enough about our own issues and what matters to us rather than trying to control the rights of everyone else???
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Kenneth E. Brown
Homeowner since 2003
