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Election 2020’s One Big Issue

Steve Russell
4 min readJul 11, 2020

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Winner takes a four-year lease photo by Pixabay.

Slogan? May I suggest, “Keep the White House White?”

I see where the POTUS is lecturing us that the words “Black Lives Matter” are a “symbol of hate.” This is consistent with his determination to fight the coming election on One Big Issue.

It’s like he finally opened a history book and noticed the One Big Issue that almost scuttled the Constitution at the drafting stage. The One Big Issue that boiled up again in a great Civil War that almost destroyed the young nation. The same One Big Issue that moved grown men to parade around with pillow slips on their heads, which was funny, and to hang the mutilated corpses of black people from trees, which was not.

It’s amazing that a POTUS would choose to make an election an overt referendum on white supremacy in 2020, but here we are. White Americans are being asked right out front to weigh the value of lives with color and compare those to lives without.

I always thought Tom Jefferson accidentally settled the One Big Issue as to blacks when he wrote to George III about why we were repealing that obnoxious tax on tea once and for all. Elsewhere in the document, he made clear that Indians were not equal, but if that truth really was “self evident,” it would come out in the wash. Maybe it will when all the reservations get running water.

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Steve Russell
Steve Russell

Written by Steve Russell

Enrolled Cherokee, 9th grade dropout, retired judge, associate professor emeritus, and (so far) cancer survivor. Memoir: Lighting the Fire (Miniver Press 2020)

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