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COVID influences view of election

To the editor:

Flash back to March 2020 … Christina and I were seven months into married life in a new city. Things couldn’t have been much better and spring was finally starting to spring.

Then Rudy Gobert got COVID and everything started to shut down, especially out there on the East Coast where older adults were dying in droves. But that wasn’t the worst part — the worst part was having a president who was continually misinforming the public about the severity of the disease and contradicting experts at the CDC. The mental effort and cognitive dissonance of attempting to warn my parents back home against Donald Trump’s irresponsible, self-serving assertions quite literally drove me crazy. I was hospitalized for two weeks to tend to my wound and my mental state.

Things didn’t end up being as bad in the more sparsely populated Midwest as I feared, but I also wasn’t wrong. Many people in Fort Dodge lost loved ones to COVID — I have two St. Edmond classmates who lost parents and another schoolmate who died at age 34. Just a few of the 400K who passed away due to COVID during the Trump presidency.

I nearly died too. I have the scar to prove it. So, if you love me or feel any sort of kinship with me at all, I implore you to consider any option other than voting for Donald Trump. Many people like me with disabilities, marginalized people, minorities, and women will all thank you for it. I barely survived his first presidency, I’m not sure those with similar mental health issues would survive the chaos of a second one.

One lesson you learn quite quickly as a person who has bipolar — who in your life has empathy. It’s made even more glaringly obvious in your lowest, worst, most embarrassing moments. And sad to say, more than any other election in my lifetime this one has starker lines of delineation between the empathetic voters (and conscientious abstainers) and the apathetic ones. For the people, for the future — America, yes we can.

Michael Flattery

St. Edmond Class of 2006

and Fort Dodge native

Chicago

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