Voter Suppression

I have spent a lot of my thought time trying to understand why people do what they do.  When I don’t understand a behavior I see, I try to put myself in the body of the one I observe and imagine what could have motivated them.  Call it empathy if you want, but I simply don’t think I should portray my ideas on anything if I haven’t attempted to fully understand it.  Our President has filled a lot of my thoughts since he declared himself to be a candidate.  I have tried without a great deal of success to understand the news clips and sound bites as the years have passed and I have failed to find the real Donald Trump hiding within.

Of late, I have been particularly challenged by his decisions, or lack thereof, as he deals with this coronavirus pandemic.  The chronology of evidence is so clear when it comes to the birth of the coming pandemic as we grasp what did he know and when did he know it?  The clues aren’t hard to find like needles in haystacks.  Rather, they are strewn in our path where we must take measures to avoid tripping over them.  But, this leaves me with a lot of confusion.  The behaviors just don’t match up with the motivations from which they came.

How could it make any logical sense to do nothing for those first six to eight weeks when our preventive measures would have been most effective in holding down the infections?  And, when we consider his refusal to get involved in a National response and leave the fifty governors to fend for themselves, how do we resolve these choices in our thinking when we are so clear about his egotistical character?  Remember those video clips of President Trump attending one of the early international meetings and forcing his way to the front of the photo lineup?  That person is not comfortable when he is not in the spotlight of center stage so why would he defer to the Governors and not want a National effort on the testing?

Could it be more voter suppression in an effort to win the election in November?  The Coronavirus is inflicting its greatest harm on low-income and low-education people who would probably vote against his reelection so doing nothing is just another way of suppressing the vote.  What kind of diabolical person would use death to suppress the vote?

It gives me no pleasure to write this post, but if I allow myself to be silenced by concerns that others might not understand my words, well, I guess I should stop writing them.

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