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Why I'm not voting


Because I can't, is why. When my husband so inconveniently died on September 24th, it was 12 days before my US citizenship interview. According to the unbreakable rules of the USCIS code, I was 'no longer living in marital union'. Therefore my citizenship application became null and void, and now I have to wait until May 2022 to apply. I have a Green card, so I can come and go as I please, except I can't because there's a pandemic going on, isn't there, so duh, and I'm safe and white, and old enough not to threaten the crumbling US jobs market, so I'll probably get it, unless I get arrested beforehand which I have promised to try very hard not to do.

There was always a question over whether I was living in marital union anyway, since Joe had fronto-temporal dementia and had been living in a nursing home for the previous three and half years, and I hadn't. Some would question whether what Joe was doing was really living, or more existing. I fall on the living side of the divide, because who knows what the experience was like from the inside? His personality, even as he wandered further and further down pathways where nobody could follow him, somehow remained unaltered in its Joe-ness. From the outside of Joe, I could see roughly the same proportions as had always existed - his maleness, his intransigence, his whimsicality, his warm capacity for love, his hot capacity for anger, his impatience, his acceptance of big stuff happening to him over which he had no control, his determination to control what he could control, his frustration at not being able to control things, such as me, which he thought he should be able to control. Joe remained Joe right up until the end, with all the splendid complexity of a human being.

But the fact is, I can't vote. The bastard. How inconsiderate of him to go and die just 6 weeks before the election. Not only can I not vote, I can't even buy a lawn sign. I did that, in 2008. I donated $50 to the Obama campaign, and a couple of weeks later received a phone call in France from a nice gentleman from the DNC who asked me if I could prove that I was a US citizen. When I stammered that I could not, he informed that in that case they would have to return my $50, which they did. When Joe and I visited the campaign store in Brattleboro VT, on a visit to our daughter that October, he had to buy an Obama/Biden bumper sticker for me, because I wasn't allowed to. When I stuck it on my car back in France, French friends said "Obama, oui! Mais qu'est-ce que ça veut dire, Biden?"

Now we all know what Biden means. I think he means well, and I think he means to be president. He probably always meant to be president. You must be bat-shit crazy to want to be president of this country is all I can say, but I never was very ambitious. Go Joe B., and heal this fucking place before it implodes on us all.

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