President Biden spoke on “Protecting the Sacred, Constitutional Right to Vote”, at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia on July 13, 2021
Wednesday night we watched the video of Biden’s speech. I’ve never felt so changed by 30 minutes of words. They broke through my anxiety from 4½ years of a national narrative that never once made sense. Today I don’t feel the same. I feel I can help change what hurts.
Here are three things I heard him say.
Freedom is not a state; it is an act. … [Most fundamental is the] right to vote freely ... the right to have your vote counted. The democratic threshold is liberty. With it, anything is possible. Without it, nothing — nothing.
Biden’s call to action is a relief to me, after these years of wondering how to help balance our government and heal the planet.
Right here, right now, our job is to convince more Americans to vote for the party that defends, not attacks, everyone’s access to the vote. When our two-party voting system in America disappears, an authoritarian will step in.
I’m not saying this to alarm you; I’m saying this because you should be alarmed.
This is not the moral manipulation we’ve struggled against from the narrative-makers. This is moral leadership.
Here and now, we can urge each other to leave our comfort zones, to say yes when the party chair, a precinct chair, or a neighbor who’s volunteering, asks us to contribute time or money. And then to be there, to come through.
The Big Lie is just that: a big lie. … In America, if you lose, you accept the results. You follow the Constitution. … You don’t call facts “fake” and then try to bring down the American experiment … The denial of full and free and fair elections is the most un-American thing that any of us can imagine, the most undemocratic, the most unpatriotic.
For me, this is where Biden broke through barriers, confidently using words like “lie”, “facts”, “fake”, “the American experiment”, “undemocratic”, “election subversion” and “unpatriotic”. When these words are actually defined for what they are and matched with reality, the Republican party narrative collapses.
It’s up to us, here and now, to tell voters in our own counties it’s ok to let the old narrative collapse, and to show up to vote for a better life for all. Everyone needs to see that “all” includes themselves and their families. We can show what such a life looks like.
Here’s one more quote from President Biden’s speech. It’s where my new hopeful feeling comes from (my italics).
Whether it’s stopping foreign interference in our elections or the spread of disinformation from within, we have to work together.