"Strongest and Most Lethal": presidential election reflections
This article and zine are written by T, a school nurse in south Minneapolis.
The election is happening this week, and I still don’t know how I will vote in the presidential election. It is not a democracy when the two main candidates are terrible choices that will lead to death for many. Personally, I have tried to keep my energy and attention away from the propaganda of debates and conventions, instead focusing on mutual aid efforts and organizing, but the presidential election is everywhere.
As I bike around Minneapolis, every Kamala and Walz sign I pass makes my stomach turn. I strongly despise both of them for their choice to continue to give Israel and UAE weapons and financial support as they commit genocides against Palestinian and Sudanese people, for Walz ignoring Indigenous sovereignty to allow Enbridge to build the Line 3 Pipeline, and for their support of overfunding the police. It is jarring to see both “Stop Line 3” signs and “Kamala and Walz” signs in Barbie font in the same yards.
Claudia and Karina’s campaign is one that I identify with the most, but it seems Minnesota won’t necessarily be a "blue” state this year. Vote with your conscience or for strategy? I’ve heard many people I respect say that if Kamala wins we will be able to keep more organizing energy on ending the genocide in Palestine. I’ve heard many people I respect say that voting for her is unconscionable because she is complicit in murdering their families and destroying their ancestral lands.
A revolving series of questions are in my head. Will we be able to organize as effectively if the already lacking environmental protections we do have are ended, the “largest deportation of immigrants” happens, if reproductive and trans rights are further stripped away, if unhoused people are increasingly criminalized? Would that make our organizing energy scattered or would it force us to work together? Do we need more time to be able to organize together and not recreate these systems of harm and degradation? Is voting for president just a way to continue to validate the empire I want to see end?
I don’t know, and I just feel sick. It doesn’t matter how awful Trump or Project 2025 is, Kamala and Walz are also war criminals and do not deserve to be put on pedestals or honored.
The rest of this post is an excerpt of a zine written in an effort to understand what it means when Kamala says she wants the “strongest and most lethal military in the world” from a personal to a global perspective.
Read the rest of the zine about how overfunding the military does not protect us, and the public health and environmental crises created by the US military around the world here.