Yesterday, I had to give a short and empowering speech on The Importance of Voting to a group of YPD’ers at a local church of which I also happen to be a member. (YPD = Young People’s Department). I titled it “What Do You Think?”

I had written a three-page speaking thesis with talking points that relied on research into prevailing populist attitudes toward the right to vote.

Not surprisingly, even though whites tend to vote more and vote more often than Black people…there are plenty of whites who also feel that their voice, and their vote, does not count.

True enough, we have the Electoral College to thank for that misunderstanding, but there wasn’t a moment in history that everyone did not have access to who, exactly, is on the electoral college in their states. I happen to know that one of the members of the “college” in my own state is a former U.S. President, James Earl (Jimmy) Carter Jr. I know who the rest of them are, as well.

But that’s not why I’m here.

I’m here to talk about why that three-page dissertation never made it to the podium, and why my heart did.

I threw the paper out and spoke from my heart about how we just haphazardly throw our voting rights in the trash bin, rights for which our ancestors shed blood and were threatened within an inch of their lives, if not outright murdered for it.

In my own small town, #DrThomasBrewer was killed, and #PrimusKing came close enough to losing his life for the demand of us to freely participate in our own government without racial restrictions. Fighting for those rights even cost an infamous white woman by the name of Viola Liuzzo, whom we rarely speak of, her own life for a cause greater than ourselves.

My main points were:

a) It isn’t just the history of the vote, and most assuredly that history is VITAL, but the FUTURE that beckons us to the demand to vote.

Our lives, our Black Lives, at that; our families, and our communities and our future as a people depend on it. For surely, those of us who have said “I don’t do politics,” politics has most assuredly “done” us.

I stated that we all do politics. If we have so much as had to negotiate with another car for a parking space and won or lost, or had only one TV in the house and had to have a loud discussion over what to watch … we do politics all day every day.

Our street lights, stop signs, the corner store, the setback line on our property, where the street lights are positioned, who patrols our streets, who watches over us while we sleep at night — it’s all politics. If we do not make the demand and control the narrative, our lives remain in the hands of those who have {ought} against us…often for no other reason than the color of our skin.

b) If we do not participate, we give others the right to say what we can and cannot do, where we can and cannot go, to control our water, the air we breathe, and even to take away our guaranteed constitutional rights because we acquiesced to their demands to control us by NOT participating in our own government.

A refusal to vote is a vote to let someone else decide for us. We pay for allowing others to make our choices in our place.

c) I stated that if they so much as go to apply for a job, they would have their lives examined inside and out.

Resume, references, character references, history, background, police reports, drug tests. Voting is the ONLY time we get to hire the ones whom we choose to represent us, and our families, our communities, and ultimately our nation to the entire world.

The converse is that we also have the right to demand they provide us their resume, character references, work history, background checks, taxes, yes, and even drug tests on them in order for us to be able to determine whether or not we should HIRE THEM to represent us. If they run for political office, nothing is “off limits.” Most assuredly, if they choose to work in government, they work FOR US, not the other way around.

We don’t need to vote just to be voting, we need to know whom we are hiring to represent us.

d) I told them it was their responsibility and duty, OUR responsibility truly, to control the future; and to not allow our history and our damages to be all for naught. It is imperative. The only time our vote doesn’t count is when we make it not count by not voting.

Less than a tenth of registered BLACK VOTERS most times actually get off their duffs to go git ‘er done, especially in all of the elections that take place IN BETWEEN the four-year presidential rest stops.

People do not spend the kind of money they spend on elections when the vote is not CRITICAL to them getting what they want when they want it and how they want it.

It is the local level voters that decide who gets to go to the White House, who decide which dogs they let out of their states and into the national dog race in the first place.

https://youtu.be/l481xK94JYoDonald Trump was just a “fluke” in the works who should never have gotten as far as he did, especially since he has no real political experience on his resume; and especially since he still seems to think he’s running against Barack Obama, whom he could never have beaten. At least he had the sense enough to wait until he could practice his misogynistic instincts against Hillary “Grab’em” Clinton to run for the highest political office in the land.

However, my gut instinct is that he (Trump) was being set up for failure by enemies that he made for himself along the way.

Some folks simply didn’t get it, didn’t get that Trump’s money is only as long as his five-letter last name and his riches aren’t worth the paper they are written on. Word out on social media is that Trump was a former Democrat who stated that he could single-handedly destroy the Republican Party; however, SNOPES.com fact-checked the Meme and found that he never said any such thing. Trump, a registered die-hard Republican, did just what the “Meme” lied about though.

Trumpenstein, they say, is a distraction. WWIII is happening on our watch, they say. And God is standing at the Gates of Heaven with the key to the Gates of Hell waiting for it. He said “mankind shall not utterly destroy itself” before He Himself intervenes.

[Amos 9.] The Lord is not coming soon–He is already here. He has simply not manifested in the form in which “every eye shall see Him” just yet. [Rev. 1:7.]

The despicable GOP “Tea Party” faction headed up by former Veep candidate Sarah Palin and her choice fringe lunatics had already fried the GOP’s reputation and nailed it to a tree.

America told her that she would never ever be a ‘heartbeat away’ from running this nation under any circumstances or by any stretch of the imagination, and she used that to unleash the beast that is going to drive this nation into oblivion. The Great Whore that rides on The Beast, while stating that she is a “great queen who is not a widow and shall know no sorrow” was unleashed for the entire world to see. [Rev. 18:7] These are the end times that Daniel 12:4 spoke of when he was told “But you, Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run back and forth, and knowledge shall be increased.”

Suffice it to say that it took the storied historical BLACK VOTE to help shove Palin and her fringe into their rightful place and kept them there.

We don’t need to hire Trump, but we ought to give credit where credit is due. He showed the Republican Party up for exactly the multitudinous white demagoguery, and pseudo-rich, fascist, hateful, misogynistic, ultra-conservative radically self-righteous pretentious fops that they really are. I didn’t say this last part in my speech to the YPD, I simply said “No one can tell you whom to vote for, but VOTE.” Make the critical response to the critical call.

e) Last but not least, I made the demand.CHOOSE. YOU choose.

The people you hire with your vote, whether your candidate wins or not, direct the future any way they want it to go because YOU have given them right to do so even if you do not vote. Do NOT get it twisted: The choice to sit down on an election is a choice, regardless.

Man up. Woman up. OWN IT.

Choose ye this day whom ye shall serve, but as for me and MY house…