Short Appreciation + Voting Suppression
It’s March 1st, so hopefully, you guys have a great month!
It’s been over a year since COVID started to spread in the U.S., and many events have happened since then. Like the 2020 presidential election, or schools being closed for almost a year now, and many other things. So I want to say thank you guys for those who did and still doing their best to keep yourself, your family, your neighbors, and other people safe from COVID. I know it has been a hard time for you. I have asthma, so wearing masks have been a real pain for me. I started college online during the fall of 2020, and I didn’t know how Zoom or Canvas worked. So as I went online classes, I lost my close friends during this pandemic. Which sucks, but honestly, people come, and people go. Due to them leaving me, I went through a depression. I stopped working out, stopped talking to people, and just fell into a hole that I thought could never end. But I survived, and I am so excited for this COVID to be gone so that I can come back to life. I shouldn’t tell you about what I am going through, but I want to share my gratitude with you because we will be done with COVID soon, and I just want to keep you guys feeling uplifted.
Now that I finished venting. I recently saw this on the news, and I think many of you guys should hear this. This has to do with politics, and I’m sorry that you have to read this, but this matters for everybody. Not everybody in every state, but currently many people in Georgia, and if this issue keeps ongoing, it will spread and hurt the people.
In 2020, Georgia causing the republican presidency to end. It took nearly 30 years for Georgia to become a blue state again. So when the 2020 election, where Jon Ossoff and Ralphael Warnock and the Democrat party won, the Republican party wants to suppress votes also, for the next election.
The restriction bills will shorten the early days of voting and voting by mail. It can stop people from voting on sunday. That targets the ‘Souls to the Polls’ when places in Georgia are having a mass of black churches going to the polls together and voting. These restriction bills will and can take place in other southern states.
However, many people voted by mail because we were in a pandemic, so many people didn’t want to get COVID but also didn’t want their voices to be silenced. It’s way easy for people to vote and not be intimidated by other people. Early days voting has helped many people to vote because it has made sure that the lines to wait for voting shorter, and again, we were and still in a pandemic. The ‘Souls to the Polls’ was a way to counter voting oppression by the racist republicans for more than 60 years. A time where being black in the South was terrible. It was a way to make sure that black voters wouldn’t get hurt and definitely wouldn’t get intimidated by voting alone.
Voting oppression in Black communities has been going for such a long time. It went from intimidating black voters to vote the racist’s favor. To the grandfather clause, if your grandfather can read and write, you can vote. To the poll taxes. To the Jim Crow Laws. To the literacy tests, which was another way to limit free slaves to vote since not many were educated. The list can go on and on.
So why does this affect you if you don’t live in Georgia?
It may not affect you now, or the next 50 years, if you live in a blue state, and if the condition is blue 24/7, things spread either fast or slow. So maybe, in the long run, your great-grandkids could have their votes be oppressed. Just because the republican party of 2020 didn’t like Georgia becoming blue and costing the republican party their chance of having another presidential term.
What can you do to help and make sure people are more aware of what’s going on in Georgia and probably other southern states?
One of the things that we do to relate with and help other people is by sharing. So share this article, share more factual articles, and better items. When we do that, we gain people’s attention, and we spread awareness. We must be there for the people in Georgia like they have been there for us. We have technology at our fingertips. We have a way to show our support to any race, to any religion, to any gender, and anybody being oppressed.
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Written By: Julian M. Calderon
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