My Personal Case For Your Harris Vote

I have done my best to maintain a positive attitude toward the election that’s happening next week, but the reality is that I have to develop coping strategies and maintain that attitude because I am completely terrified of what happens if I’m wrong and Trump wins. I think about the possibility every day and have to push back against it to keep the anxiety and dread from consuming me, as I’m sure many of you do. The stakes are high here, higher than they were in 2016 and 2020.

We know what a Trump administration is capable of because they overturned Roe, putting millions of women in danger. We know that they tried to do much worse, like a full ban on Muslims entering the US, but were stopped by the courts. We also know that they’ve spent over half a decade trying to figure out how to succeed where they were deterred. You can’t say that we’ve survived one Trump administration because the one that’s looming as a possibility ahead of us would be so much worse.

I went and saw a movie about Uyghurs in Xinjiang this week, Nikah. It’s the story of a young woman struggling with the pressures of tradition and marriage against the backdrop of worsening oppression in the region. The film closes with her getting married in the traditional way, like her sister did at the beginning of the movie, but in secret to a man who lives in France because the traditions have been banned. In the final shot, there’s a knock on the door as she sits with her mother in law on a video call with her husband in Paris, discussing the future. There’s a knock on the door, and a voice off screen says they’re from the neighborhood committee and she needs to come with them. The mother in law goes to see what the problem is. You don’t see either of them again, and the film closes with the husband, visible on a phone propped against a tea kettle, asking where everyone went even though he knows in his heart what has happened.

I bring up that story because we would like to believe that it can’t happen here, but that’s exactly what’s planned. The Trump administration has plans to deport millions of “illegals”, far more than the number of undocumented people living here in America. They are going to do it quickly, and they are going to do it violently. The will do it to non-citizens and to citizens. That’s where my personal fear comes in.

My wife was born in Beijing, and became a citizen as a teenager. It would be foolish of me to assume that her being Chinese would offer her any protection, given that the Trump administration tried to blame China for COVID, leading to a wave of anti-Asian racism. It would also be foolish to assume that any level of privilege or the trappings of social class would render her immune to a racist mob backed by the government trying to deport as many people as they can.

This is my personal plea to you — vote for Kamala Harris so I don’t have to wake up every day wondering if this is going to be the day that I wake up to a knock on the door and they take my wife away. I can’t be the husband on the other end that knows he’s never going to see his wife again, and given that we know what these plans are, you can’t say you didn’t know what the consequences of not voting for Harris will be. Vote even if you don’t think your vote counts because if Trump tries to steal the election, every vote counts.

This is my personal plea to you, there are millions of other personal pleas out there. Pleas from women who don’t want to worry about dying in childbirth, pleas from children born here who don’t want to see their parents deported, pleas from people with far more to lose than I do. The only way you can vote to say that you don’t want this to happen is to vote for Harris. Anything else is something you’re going to have to live with if the Trump administration does what it says it’s going to.