Who Do I Get to Sue?
Hi. Hello there. It’s me, a regular ol’ citizen of these great United States. I think you know me pretty well by now since everyone in the world has been wondering what I was doing over the last year. How will I vote? Will I wear a mask during a pandemic? Everyone has had a take and departed wisdom about what I was going to do this year and why I would do it. From my end, you over-thought everything. It was pretty obvious all along, wasn’t it? I voted for Joe Biden to cut the fascists off while keeping the government divided, and we stayed inside and wore masks. Most of the time. I mean, sure, we had a few house parties early on, but we didn’t know how bad it was going to be, did you? And sure, you caught me at the beach on Labor Day. But it’s pretty safe to be outside during COVID is what I’ve heard. And when the deaths started rolling in, we started taking it seriously. We stopped seeing our friends, even in small groups. We don’t go out to bars or restaurants anymore, and even cut back ordering take out. I go to the grocery store, but that’s because delivery fees are adding up and I’ve been out of work since May. Pretty predictable stuff, right? You wouldn’t have had to stretch your imagination that far to guess that’s how things would go in a well-educated and wealthy country. But You guessed right, even if you got yourself really worked up to get to this conclusion. I never surprised the family. My cousin, though? Woof. Sometimes we forget about Rick from the Stix. And why shouldn’t we? He never comes by and always holds a grudge that his much smaller side of the family has to come to the city for the holidays and that we made a little more money than him. Always used derogatory terms like calling me a “city boy” even though I grew up in a suburb and it takes me 45 minutes to drive to the city.
He’s always been a wildcard, but I always felt underneath the cargo shorts, beer belly, and excessive store of ammo, he was a decent guy that just wanted to make his way through life and have a few laughs. We disagreed over stuff like taxes or whatever but it never led me to worry. Not a lot, anyways. When some of my more diverse friends weren’t around he’d start to tell different jokes or talk about different people. He felt like he could tell me those things because I look like him, but he forgets I’m not very much like him. The dam broke last year when he started spitting on people’s faces during a pandemic and telling me that Bill Gates was going to track us with the vaccine. I stopped talking to him at that time too. And you know what, it wouldn’t have bothered me very much if this thing only affected him. At least then I could feel good and smug if he got it and realized it wasn’t a joke after recovering. If he died, I’d still be torn up about it because he’s family, afterall. Unfortunately, the virus spreads and it spreads fast and now so many people have died and my cousin has gone on a killing spree, including a ton of his own family members. And I finally decided I had to do something so I got together with my other friends and family and begged the government to make rules about where you could go without a mask, or at all, just so we could stop the bleeding of human lives. The most we asked is that people please not. We couldn’t even convince the government to arrest people who violated people’s civil right to not get a contagious disease. And then the lawsuits started coming. From my cousin and his friends. The ones who were killing everyone started to sue those of us who are just trying to be decent neighbors.
If that wasn’t bad enough, my cousin and his friends started spreading conspiracies about the election, which turned out to be one of the cleanest and well run elections in a long time, notwithstanding their nonsense. And, I’ll give my cousin this much, it’s pretty clever to talk about an election conspiracy for a bunch of months and then use the fact that people are talking about the conspiracy as proof of it. That’s pretty smart for him. I never had reason to believe my cousin was good at anything in particular. Turns out, he’s a pretty good propagandist. At the end of the day, what could I do about this? I argued with him about it online, but the conspiracies they could make up on the fly were unlimited so I just stopped. Freedom of speech means he’s free to be duped and I can’t force him to see he’s being made a fool of even as I show him proof. I get sad knowing that, since I’ve stopped trying to convince him he’s wrong, he’ll never be exposed to the truth, that he’s damned to be this kind of person for the rest of his life. Despite his escalating insanity, I knew that his belief, no matter how strong it was, would never overturn the election and I took solace in at least that much. Then he started suing me again! For nothing! All I did was look for work, keep my head down, and laugh at the paltry amount of money the government was going to give me and my friends to make it through this disaster. But now I have to deal with more lawsuits. Fine, so be it.
The lawsuits kept coming, one after another, about all sorts of crazy things he was claiming I was involved in, from pizza-shop pedophiles to a Democrat conspiracy to cost Trump the election while still letting Republicans win a bunch of seats in the House and Senate. Ultimately, courts agreed their suits had no basis. They lost over 60 times. My cousin’s cases were so bad judges were saying things like, “Oh, c’mon!” — things people who cover courts never hear judges say. And despite these tremendous losses, they shifted the blame of their defeat away from the fact that they have no proof supporting their outrageous claims, to asserting their team in Congress can just upend the election anyways. They finally said, “Fuck it, your vote doesn’t count, period.” All because we, I thought, disagreed about tax rates and stuff. But it turns out we disagreed about the very basic principles of democracy and humanity. I still disagree with other people in my family and some of my friends about taxes, but we never disagree about basics, like the right to vote, like I do with Rick.
This can’t stand and me and my friends want to take the fight to them. We’re going to do the basic stuff, showing up and voting, even getting organized politically and pushing for better government across the board, which is all well and good. But if you want to know what I’m worried about right now, it’s the guys in Congress that are so desperate for Rick and his friend’s votes that they’re trying to rip apart the fabric of our society and are gleefully using the legal system to do it. They spread outrageous lies on the evening news and then smile for the cameras at a campaign event. They’re attacking my right to vote. They’re attacking your right to vote. Rick and his friends don’t realize it yet but they’re attacking his right to vote, too. And I don’t think it will stop unless we can bury them under lawsuits. How can we get such a ball rolling? How do I sue Rick and his friends for attacking my elections and my public health? How can we punish lawyers that advance lies and conspiracies, gobbling up the courts time and the taxpayers money? How can we promise consequences to politicians that do not allow duly-elected members of their chamber to take their seats like what’s happening in Pennsylvania right now? How can we promise to imprison people that tamper in our elections? Who do I get to sue?
