Election 2016: A critical choice is at hand.

Please think very carefully about your vote in a few weeks.  If you vote for anyone that is not Clinton or Trump, you will be throwing your vote away and helping one of the other candidates win.  That is not scare tactics; that is practical reality.  If you feel as I do, that neither candidate is totally (or at all) acceptable, then the most good you can do given the choices we’ve been given is to vote against the candidate that you don’t want most.  Vote for the lesser evil.

Please remember how this happened this time.  Then get out there next time and work for good candidates from the beginning.  There’s really nothing we can do this time unless the GOP dumps Trump before the election.  I can’t imagine that will happen.  They just won’t do that.

But I want you to think about this: How do you suppose Trump’s daughter feels about the revelations this past few days in the news. Behind the scenes, where the public cannot see her, in her heart, what impact has this had on her? Locker room or not, what kind of man says something like that about his daughter?  Ever?  I don’t know any good man who would ever speak that kind of garbage anywhere. The kind of person who says things like that is nothing more than ignorant trash.

Fathers, who do you think Trump was talking about when he spoke of women and how he prefers to “handle” them?  He was talking about all women – your daughters, your wives, your friends and your loved ones.  What would you do if you heard someone speak of your daughter that way?  Vote for them?

The president represents all of us as the “face” of the United States around the world. How could you possibly consider this person as a leader of the free world? How could we be so ignorant? What would it say about us if we had such a man representing us around the world. These things do matter - despite what his remaining right-wing supporters and all the neo-Nazis would have you believe.  

Where Trump belongs is in some deep, dark basement where no one would ever have to hear his vile voice again (or in that same prison he threatens to put Hilary in...).

I also flatly reject the assertion that Hilary Clinton is just as bad. She has a nearly forty year record of working for the American people.* Trump has never worked for anyone but himself, and that not honestly, but at the expense of others.  We have no reason to believe he will be any different as president and you're a fool if you think that doesn't matter.

*Just so you know, I am a fiscal conservative in the traditional sense and would not vote for Clinton if I had a good choice otherwise.  But she is NOT evil incarnate.  Those of you that think so are wrong. Conservative America, Donald Trump does not in any way share the ideals and values you hold most dear; you are being played.

There are parallels – similar political rhetoric and candidates – in the history of the past one-hundred years.  Because people did nothing to stop it when they might have, because the idea of a resurgent nation was attractive to them, because they gave in to ignorant and unthinking hate-rhetoric and hatred of those that weren’t much different than themselves, the entire world was plunged into evil chaos that took millions of lives and 6 + years to obliterate, not to mention the millions of innocent lives murdered during those years.  If you don’t think that could happen again, you’re wrong.  That all started a little at a time, because a nation was fed up with a status quo. I wouldn't want to see anything like that happen in my country, even to some lesser degree.

The hour is late and ignorance, irrational hatred and bigotry are out of the closet, even valued.  It is time for intelligence and wiser people to speak up – and act.