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To The Honorable Michelle Obama, First Lady of the United States of America:
On April 22, 2020, Valarie Jarrett, POTUS’s Senior Advisor and family confidant said there was “no chance” that you would be Joe Biden’s running mate. When your family left the White House, it was a sound, personal decision when you and your family left public life. After everything you and your family went through during those eight years of service, you deserved the rest and the right to walk away. It was OK, even with the individual who shocked us all and won.
Then the virus came.
Black, Latino, Native, and poor Whites are dying and more lives are at stake because the government as we knew it no longer exists. America is flat-lining and the world is watching. We need Joe Biden for President; Biden’s history in politics, his empathy, his raw guts, and, yes, his vocal gaffes make him human, approachable. To put it in Biden’s own words, “This is a big fucking deal.”
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FLOTUS, please allow me to make the case for why you should be Biden’s Vice President on behalf of the ancestors:
(1) I understand you made a deal with POTUS. He got to be President and you were the best FLOTUS in history. I understand you decided, upon leaving the White House, to spend time with your husband, make that dollar, do the books, do the films, and create the life and legacy for your family. Team Obama deserved that; you earned that and we should, under other circumstances, leave you alone and continue to revere you from afar. However, this is not the same world you left, my Nubian Sister-Queen. We want you back—no, we NEED you back—and the role of Vice President is the perfect opportunity for you.
(2) We are dying in numbers that, if allowed to go unchecked, will soon equal our losses in the slave trade. The disenfranchised—people without access to adequate healthcare—are the last to be tested. I mean seriously, if white people can’t get tested unless they are an athlete or movie star, then essential workers without adequate PPE—the medical staff, the police officer, the bus driver, the grocery clerk—are all gambling with our lives and that of our loved ones. So many people on the frontline are dying for no reason except for politicians ignoring your husband’s words from five years ago about a coming pandemic. You come from a stellar working-class family. You uniquely understand what the families of the essential workers are going through and you clearly and effectively utilized your role as FLOTUS to bring “light” to subjects that others would comfortably ignore. Imagine what you can do to set policy that changes lives forever.
(3) The rush back to work to “save the economy” will be on the back of the workers who are poor and middle class. The deaths will be of the very people we claim to celebrate including the essential workers. These people, people who love what you and your husband meant to us all, will die. Joe Biden’s voting block will die. The wealthy won’t die because they don’t have to go into the face of the virus daily. You know who the first responders and frontline people are. You grew up on the South Side of Chicago; you know the effort these people put in on a daily basis because you saw them as a child. Your parents were friends with them. You know their heart and soul and you will set policies that will benefit them.
(4) Our Freedom of the Press has been decimated by this administration. The press is forced to broadcast the lies and blamestorming while sustaining personal abuses hurled by the representatives we hired. Respectful discourse has gone straight to hell and too many people accept the lies without looking deeper simply because of the position of the source. Our press deserves respect; they deserve the ability to question our leaders for our sake. Without the press and their freedom to poke and prod for the good of all of us, we are no better than a communist country. Without the press, we would not know about the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, The My Lai Massacre, without the press, our freedom, and our right to information is a facade no one knows or has had a better relationship with the press than you. You answer directly and respectfully and the times you have had to get snarky with the press its always been “on point” never personal, always direct and concise. As you have stated when they go low, you have always gone high. The press needs interaction with someone honorable and beyond reproach in order to restore their respectability.
(5) For a fair and balanced election now and in the future, voters need you. Redistricting vote-by-mail and the defunding of the Post Office combined with the death of the disenfranchised voters is slowly but surely whittling away at Joe’s lead. Its driving fear into the electorate. There is no other running mate he can pick that will cause Americans to risk their lives to go vote. Let this sink in. People will risk their lives to get you and Biden into the White House. There is no loss equation with you on the ticket. Our people shed blood to vote. We are dying now at an unprecedented rate, With you, only you on the ticket this would energize all people of all colors to get that vote in. And yes, like we did at the beginning of the Voters Rights Act…people will shed blood to get there for this ticket. No one, respectfully, will add this level of value to the ticket. No one.
(6) Immigrants need you. Undocumented people are being denied entry by the same hypocrites who ensure that their own in-laws or parents from non-“shithole” countries get in. We aren’t the beacon of freedom we had hoped to be. Instead, we are the country that allows ICE to separate children from their parents, lets parents die face down in rivers, allows the arrests of the parents while their children are in school so that there is no one to explain that Mommy and Daddy are not home because ICE has detained them. You and your husband were raised to be empathic, loving, caring, and thoughtful to even the least of us. You danced in the White House with a beautiful elderly black woman, Barack gave a “pound” to a brother janitor in the White House. With your finely tuned insight, who better to decide policy? You were raised to show love to others no matter what their station is in life. Who better for the VP job than the transcendent descendant of slaves.
(7) We the People are tired: Racism is unchecked, hate is at an all-time high because hate groups receive coded messages of approval from this administration. Our citizens and residents of Chinese ethnicity or heritage are attacked for no reason except for the fact that they are Chinese. The president treats our Justice Department as if it were his private law firm and they only seek to sue or defend when it’s in the interest of the administration. As a result, this Justice Department has one client and it is NOT the people of the United States. As a lawyer, you know Barr should be disbarred for his conduct which was excoriated by a federal judge and the president’s counsel during the impeachment. How do these people retain their law licenses and why, for the love of all that’s good, hasn’t the Bar Associations stepped up in the wake of these blatant lies, misdirection, and dereliction of duty? Racism is just large and in charge. These folks need to learn or crawl back under the rocks from whence they came. Your sheer presence will tell them there is no place for them in the United States of America.
(8) Mother Earth, needs you. The Pandemic has shown the correlation between our poor stewardship of the earth and that of the current administration that laments when gas prices drop to -35% but have nothing to say about coal, fracking, drilling, air pollution, or the Kyoto Protocol. Instead of embracing the call of the child whose voice the world hears, she is mimicked and mocked by a reality TV persona who is playing President. People forget that the human condition is a part of the environment. You started programs to ensure that healthy food, exercise, and state of mind were part of environmental concerns. The simple planting of the garden on the grounds of the White House was the simplest yet one of the most far-reaching acts during your tenure. The policies for our environment would be far-reaching in fact global in having our country return as a leader in the global discourse on protecting the environment. This is for your children, your grandchildren, and every child who has the right to breath clean air, drink clean water, and see animals before they are extinct.
(9) We need the President back also, this time on the Supreme Court. There is a frontal assault on the rights of the poor, on immigrants, and on women. I have to guilt him also, but Sasha and Malia need him to make this a better world for the women they will be. We need to protect them because this court is designed to destroy freedoms driven by men of questionable repute and unclean hands. We don’t have Malcolm, we don’t have Martin, we don’t have a Kennedy. We had you and your husband, and we need BOTH of you now more than ever. Yes, I am asking you to give us more time under your leadership. I am asking you to use a little more of your life to save what’s left of the carcass that was once America. We can’t depend on the “Notorious RBG” forever.
(10) Barak stated that the world would be a better place if women were in positions of leadership (paraphrased). Think of what that would mean to every child on the planet. Think of the legacy you have already built and what that would mean for the next 100 years. Think of the glow in the eyes of your children, your Mother. Think of what the spirits of the brown bodies that framed our pathway to this country in the ocean and how they would forgive every injustice because you walked back into that building? Think about the little black girls who saw YOUR portrait in the National Portrait Gallery.
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We built America on our backs through the blood of our ancestors along with every immigrant that hit these shores. The souls of the slaves who built the White House could finally rest when our first Black President and First Family walked into the Family Quarters and called that building home for 8 years.
The fact that you “don’t want” this position proves you all the more worthy of it. Every other proposed VP pick is wonderful and highly qualified. It’s different for you, though, because in your instance, its a “calling” and for many of us who get a calling, we don’t ask for it and we don’t want it. It’s the universe telling us that we are needed to save more than ourselves. People are dying and will continue to die and we just can’t risk anyone else. You would balance the ticket. You would again give us what we have lost and that is hope.
Please say yes to being Joe Biden’s VP.
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Watch this interview segment related:
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Photo credit: Screenshot from CBS Pittsburgh video