Embody the Spirit of Fannie Lou Hamer on November 3rd!

On Facebook I encountered this post by Rusty Hassan. Here is what I wrote to him, followed by his post:

Greetings Rusty, this is one of the best essays I’ve read this election cycle. The power of the Vote as embodied in each citizen, which you exemplified in the case of Fannie Lou Hamer’s resolve and enthusiasm, is what each one of us needs at this pivotal moment. It must be shared far and wide! Permit me to share it and promote it on my blog with your full attribution. Well done, my friend! Please let me know if you consent to be a guest writer on my blog, D-Day Media Group blog. Thank you!

Rusty’s post:

Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer has been on my mind a lot lately. A lot. In 1967 right after I graduated from GU my friend John Reddy asked me to meet him in Ruleville Mississippi by driving his 1960 Studebaker Lark with Willie Crutcher, our 50-something African American friend and 18 year old Randi Parr, TV personality Jack Parr’s daughter. Willie liked to drive that Lark at 105, terrifying Randi and me. In Sunflower County I joined John and our friend Ed Seiz in knocking on doors urging and assisting folks to register to vote, drinking liquor with Pap Hamer and checking out juke joints. Randi split and went home early.

What has really stayed with me all these 53 years was sitting in Mrs. Hamer’s living room listening to her impart us with her wisdom, telling us that the “revolution” wasn’t coming but change certainly could through the vote. Here was a woman who was jailed and severely beaten for trying to register, who challenged President Lyndon Johnson at the 1964 Democratic convention with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, expressing her faith in democracy, that change could come through implementation of the Voting Rights Act. Mrs. Hamer challenged the racist voter suppression of the Dixiecrats.

Today the Republicans are suppressing the vote. The Republican John Roberts gutted the Voting Rights Act in the Supreme Court. Republican governors and state legislators are doing everything possible to limit voting in an effort to keep in office the most corrupt, autocratic, incompetent, evil president in US history, who has separated children from their parents and kept them in cages (shouldn’t we still be outraged?), degraded the environment, denied climate change, destroyed the mission of the agencies in his charge, belittled the heroism of US armed forces, encouraging racist violence and cynically allowing for the deaths of now approaching 200,000 Americans by undermining the efforts to limit and control the pandemic of Covid 19 virus, the corruption and lawlessness, oh so many other outrages. I am encouraged by the Republicans who have come out in opposition to Trump, many of whom have left the party.

I am concerned about progressives who still feel there is no difference between the parties and won’t vote for Biden. I am as perplexed about them as I am about family members who support Trump. He needs to be overwhelmingly defeated. Biden needs a landslide that will take the Senate with him. Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer has been on my mind a lot. Not to speculate what she would think today. But what she instilled in me that brief time in Ruleville, Mississippi, of the importance of the vote.

Please share this powerful essay with your friends and all those in your center of influence to encourage them to vote. Vote as though your life depends on it because it does!