Most of you may have already forgotten Seth Abramson, a political writer for Huffington Post who was the most ardent Bernie fan in the world of what may loosely be called professional “journalism.” A flat-out Bernie propagandist, really. Or as he puts it in his latest piece, published on Friday:
The Washington Post went so far as to call me a Sanders “zealot,” while New York Magazine charged that I had invented a new genre of creative writing ― “experimental political fan fiction” ― with the exclusive aim of helping Sanders defeat Clinton.
You can find this article here, and I highly recommend reading it, as it is well worth it:
www.huffingtonpost.com/…
It is entitled “The Long, Hard Road to a Clinton Vote.”
He still has reservations about Clinton, but he is voting for her, and not holding his nose while doing it. Why? Lots of reasons, such as sharing the vast majority of her political beliefs. But there is also his mother, his wife, and his niece.
When he announced his support for Clinton on Twitter, he experienced the backlash we are all too familiar with from Bernie-or-Busters. His advice to these holdouts:
My point in writing this post ... to urge those few Sanders supporters who still appear to be on the fence about Clinton to do just one thing before you walk into the voting booth in November.
And that one thing is this: talk to the women in your life.
Not just your mother, but your sisters, your daughters, your nieces, your female friends and neighbors. Heck, if you work in a workplace where political conversations are acceptable, and you find the right opening for one, talk to your female coworkers. Find out what it means for our nation, after forty-four men in the Oval Office, to now stand a chance of seeing a smart, competent, generally progressive female sitting in that august and powerful space.
And then there is this powerful point about the alternative, Trump, and the idiotic privilege one must have to vote Green:
At some point, with so much at stake, a leap of faith is called for.
Not for my sake, but for others’.
For I will not forget ― and I cannot forget ― my African-American friends and neighbors and colleagues, my Asian-American friends and neighbors and colleagues, my Latino friends and neighbors and colleagues, my Jewish and Muslim friends and neighbors and colleagues, all those I have known and cared for over the course of my life who are gay, lesbian, transgendered, bisexual, queer, recent immigrants, atheists, on disability, or single mothers. These are all inhabitants of the world I live in, but are not, I don’t think, major players in the world Donald Trump sees. As a straight white man, am I somehow excused from thinking about what life would be like under the presidency of a man who doesn’t see most of the people I know and love, or, if he sees them, holds them in contempt? What level of risk of, say, a nuclear war caused by Donald Trump’s sociopathic hubris is acceptable to me as a voter? What level of risk that we leap headlong over the tipping point for environmental apocalypse? What level of risk that my President spews rhetoric from the Oval Office that daily scares many of my friends, neighbors, and colleagues? Is a 5% risk okay? A 0.5% risk?
Again, I suggest you read the whole thing. It’ll make you feel a whole lot better about Berniacs.