Time’s Up, America

No matter who wins the election, we are done waiting for change.

We’re all tuned in to CNN or FOX News waiting for answers. The answers have been in front of our faces for a very long time. No matter who wins the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election, time is up for both parties.

It was on Facebook where an anonymous liberal commenter wrote that socialists, communists, and those leaning to the left of the Democrats were being too impatient about change in the United States. They wrote that we needed more time to make the changes Americans have needed and demanded for decades through several conservative and liberal presidents. We need to be more patient, that’s all.

Apparently, the United States needs more time to finally come up with a decent healthcare system, as if COVID-19 didn’t already make us hyper-aware that our healthcare system is absolutely barbaric. We need more time, I guess, to finally get to a place where this country treats Black people like human beings, ceasing the extrajudicial executions by agents of the state. We need more time to erase the homophobia, ableism, and sexism that made this country so “great” to some. We need to flip senators and congresspeople and it’ll get better.

We need to do this, we need to do that. We need to wait and see; hurry up and wait. Whatever we do, we need to vote, so that we can go back to waiting in blissful pseudo-ignorance for four years, and then four more years after that.

We need to forget that the Democrats gave Donald Trump over $730 billion to create the Space Force when everybody knows that space is a global commons. It belongs to all of us. This was of no concern to either party, however. Liberals had time to give Donald Trump what he wanted in four years. The less privileged and disadvantaged? Well, we just need to give them more time.

We need to forget that it was under President Barack Obama that African-Americans hemorrhaged the wealth they’d worked so hard to accumulate thanks to his policies. These policies further emboldened banks like Wells Fargo who targeted black families they called “mud people” into subprime loans. We need to forget that the rich got richer under Obama. We, on the other hand, got got. But still, we need to give the suits in Washington — especially the liberal ones — more time.

It’s just that I can’t seem to forget the drones that Obama unleashed on the Middle East, and the slave auctions that he facilitated when he destabilized Libya. I can’t forget that he sided with the banks in a recession. I can’t forget the ascent of AFRICOM under Obama’s watch, and the hell it has unleashed on the African continent ever since.

I can’t forget the betrayals and the outright disregard for the poorest of the working class here and abroad. I can’t stop thinking about how many cops got away with murder despite embarrassingly tone-deaf beer summits trying to humanize the kind of cop that would kill a black person if they breathed wrong. I refuse to forget how liberals ignored — and failed — Flint, only to mock the long-suffering people of that oft-forsaken Michigan city last night:

Time is up. The conservatives (Republicans and everyone to the right of their unfortunate position) know time is up for them. That’s why they elected a bellicose buffoon. They know the jig is up, hence their efforts to secure the Supreme Court and erode any of the meager protections Americans fought hard to get in the first place.

Liberals are under the impression that if Biden is elected they can just move on. If we could just elect Biden — an establishment Democrat through and through — then we could all go back to brunch… And waiting year after year for something, anything, to happen. It’s not about progress, but about going back to what we know. It’s much more comfortable than worrying about the violence either of these two candidates will certainly export abroad.

COVID-19 has laid bare the failures of neoliberalism and capitalism. It’s as if the four horsemen of the apocalypse were unleashed last winter, and things are only going to get worse. There is no going back to normal. Pandora has opened the box and all the monsters are free.

How much more time does a nation need when doing the right thing is easy? It’s not hard to provide universal healthcare for all, free education, or affordable housing when you take the money allotted for war and use it for the greater good. It’s not hard to save money by not waging endless destabilization campaigns in Venezuela, Haiti, and other black and brown countries.

Time is up. No matter who is elected we cannot survive if we sit around and wait for either of these substandard candidates to do anything for us. They are not beholden to us, but to the very corporations that are poisoning us and working us to death in a pandemic. What else are we to expect?

No, you will not be able to get back to brunch with Joe Biden elected, and he definitely won’t heal a country this torn. Joe Biden cannot, and will not, end the slow, painful death throes of this aging, decrepit empire. He is one of its most ardent soldiers. His sole purpose, like Donald Trump’s, is to defend it until it’s last dying breath.

The American people will still take to the streets to decry and protest against the police brutality that fuels this country. The people will still come to the conclusion, daily, that they were lied to, and the realization that this country was never free. Americans will still have to battle rising inequality and the callous disregard that comes with it. Time is up and it’s about time.

We cannot wait or hold on any longer. We’ve waited through several world wars, civil rights movements, and American imperial regimes. How much longer should black mothers and fathers wait for justice for their children? How much longer should our LGBTQIA family and friends wait to be treated like first-class citizens? How many more women have to struggle or worse? How much more blood needs to be shed; how many more tears need to fall before change finally comes?

Equality is not something you wait for, it’s something you fight for. It’s not something that you wait for passively. It’s something that you demand if it is withheld from you. Time is up. We are not going to wait anymore.

We cannot vote away the sins and transgressions of this country. We cannot vote away the wholesale murder and execution of those with disabilities or mental illnesses. Voting will not save my children, or yours, from the other fascist half of this country.

Time is up. We’ve waited long enough, and we won’t wait anymore. Our lives depend on this. Wealthy white men who serve their corporate masters well will not save us, election be damned.

Thanks for reading!