monkinetic the blog

Donald J. Trump is having a rotten impact on relationships in my life.

That’s a sentence (among many) I never thought I’d be saying[^1].

A while back my wife and I had taken to occasionally asking each other questions from the Ungame at night before bed. It was a nice slow-down from the day, often interesting and often funny. We’re doing it almost very night now because it gives us something to talk about that isn’t Trump or politics, topics which get us both steaming and frustrated.

My in-laws are in town and I know they voted for Trump. I love them dearly and know why they voted the way they did. It doesn’t take away the sting of knowing I can’t really talk about or process the election with them without causing more harm than good. I may yet get to where I can be civil about it, but that’s not yet.

I’m mostly off Facebook these days. Seeing family, church friends, and people in my wider network sharing pro-Trump posts - I’ve even seen Breitbart links - just discourages me to no end. It literally saps my will to even engage on the platform. I haven’t deleted FB yet from my phone but I’ve thought about it.

I’m conflicted. My inner demons are hassling me about being a rich white whiner, but I’m also just depressed and I’m having a hard time figuring out how to get through this.

[^1]: I would have assumed that if I were ever discussing any impact Trump had on my life, it would be a negative impact, but not for the reasons we’re now discussing.

My state, y’all:

> Phoenix’s Maricopa County, the largest in the state, reduced the number of polling places by 70 percent from 2012 to 2016, from 200 to just 60—one polling place per every 21,000 voters.

> Reducing the number of polling places in Phoenix had catastrophic consequences in the March 22 primary.

From There Were 5-Hour Lines to Vote in Arizona Because the Supreme Court Gutted the Voting Rights Act (emphasis mine).

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was created during the Civil Rights movement in response to southern states passing laws that kept huge swaths of African-Americans from voting, through a variety of techniques. The VRA required certain states with a history of these practices to submit any voting law changes to federal oversight.

(NPR’s piece on the Act gives a good history and the real problems with disenfranchisement it was intended to address: Block The Vote: A Journalist Discusses Voting Rights And Restrictions)

This year, election officials made a bunch of changes to processes and polling stations that (for whatever reasons were given at the time) resulted in voting difficulties that disproportionately affected non-white voters. From the Center for American Progress (CAP), Preventing Problems at the Polls: Arizona:

> In Phoenix – which is a majority-minority city and the largest metropolitan area in the state – there was only one polling site per 108,000 residents, whereas some predominantly non-Latino white communities had one polling site for as few as 8,500 residents.

CAP goes on:

> A 2014 Center for American Progress report found that in Arizona and 15 other states in 2012, counties with the most voters of color used the most provisional ballots.47 Arizona State University’s Cronkite News stated that voters “in precincts with higher percentages of minorities had a greater chance of casting provisional ballots.”

I love living in Arizona, but this kind of behavior from our elected officials is criminal, and I’m wondering how to help our state get back on track.