Why I Will Never Be 'Ready for Hillary'

If you have kept up with the US political cycle, you noticed potential prospects for the next President touted after President Barack Obama’s re-election. Elizabeth Warren, Marco Rubio, and Chris Christie are familiar names for many of us – even if this happened without our consent. Among the political ranks of the Democratic Party, one name has remained present at the forefront of liberal political imaginations – Hillary Clinton. I will not vote for her. I have learned too much about her to do so with good conscience.

Hillary Clinton: the stateswoman whom I have known since I first learned to count in kindergarten. My initial understanding of Hillary was strictly as the wife of then President Bill Clinton. A President my parents liked, so naturally in my childhood ignorance, I liked him as well. My innocence would be brought into question through that President’s sex scandal. Calls for his impeachment, Monica Lewinski, and “I did not have sex with that woman” all complicated my perception of Hillary Clinton. But despite the political turmoil of that time, I still looked at Hillary with starry childlike eyes. I thought she would always represent the epitome of the perfect “First Lady.”

That perfection would begin to fall short many years later as I grew to know Hillary as a hopeful in the 2008 Presidential election. The Hillary who boasted without shame about an Associated Press poll stating then-Senator Obama’s “support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again.” And if that is not enough, the incredibly racist birther rumor came out of Hillary’s camp. Her willingness to use race to gain any miniscule advantage showed me how she feels about my race. So when President Obama ushered her in as Secretary of State, she had already left a bad taste in my mouth before she defended her first drone strike. I was officially done with Hillary when she inhumanely laughed upon receiving news of Muammar Gaddafi’s death coldly exclaiming “We came, we saw, he died.”

Will Hillary be lauded as a symbol of democracy because people are too careless to address the directive she issued not long ago seeking DNA, fingerprints, iris scans, credit card numbers, email addresses, phone, fax and pager numbers and even frequent-flyer account numbers for UN figures?

Despite this, liberals will likely forget or ignore her record of wrongdoing, and support Hillary in the coming Presidential election if she chooses to run. The decrepit two party system forces desperate poor choices between bad or worse. The Obama era illustrated that diversity and change in appearance are not guarantees of actual change. So despite the fact that Hillary is a woman, it would be foolishly naive to think that that alone makes her a good candidate. At this point, I can admit I felt just as credulous in equivalently believing that electing a biracial President might make a difference. It’s unfortunate, but I have no doubt in my mind that many will fall for the same trick in the years to come.

Whether you like Hillary or not, you cannot ignore her record of racism, callousness, and brutality in the name of the US empire. It speaks to the political amnesia, apathy, and weakness of the liberal class to uplift such a person. It’s the same illogicality that excuses every atrocity that occurs under our current administration leading people to spew talking points as if they are absolute truth. There is no question in my mind, being ‘Ready for Hilary’ actually means being ready to compromise yet again. And I’m not ready to do that.

We can do better than putting our worries, desires, and outcomes into the hands of another politician like Hillary Clinton. Nothing is going to change unless we become serious about addressing the inconsistencies of this nation. We constantly erase ourselves and our collective power every time we look to someone else for liberation. Instead we could be drawing our futures through the realization that the problems the world faces are not going to be solved by those that relish in them. Everyone deserves better.

We have yet to discontinue a tradition that is as old as politics itself. We continually put our energy into developing political parties instead of our own resources. The blind faith that we hinge to these troubling brands of identity only serve to keep the world the same. We should not expect anything to change if we are invested in repeating history. And during moments of clarity when we recognize something is wrong, we look for new hopefuls to send into the very same system that has corrupted so many. The cycle is redundant and those who feed it are religiously drunk on the opiate that is party politics.

There is something earthed in the dystopia we call home, the grave of resistance. The epitaph is an “I voted” sticker. At some point we became satisfied again. We became content again with one of the most egregious children of colonialism and conquest, our country, the United States. Here we are between a rock and a hard place again. Will we rebel or will we fall prey to the ideology that there is a difference between the puppet on the left or the puppet on the right?

No more picking the lesser of two evils for the rest of my life until I can no longer define evil itself. Instead I am going to believe in my capacity to do what’s right for my community without any political disappointments.