Joe Biden

First off, I voted for Pete Buttigieg in the 2020 Democratic Primary, despite the fact that he had already dropped out of the race. It was a vote of confidence in his staying power, but more on that later. In the General Election, however, I was one of the 81 million votes that helped Joe get elected.

So why did I vote for Biden? I’m a liberal Democratic-Socialist in the vein of Sanders and Warren, but I voted for a guy who oversaw the confirmation of Justice Thomas and was a big part of passing the “tough on crime” laws of the late ‘90’s. A man who himself was has accusations of misconduct against him. So why vote for him?

Grief, which leads to compassion and empathy. These qualities in a person make them a great leader, especially in times like these. The complete lack of leadership qualities from the previous person in charge made the field ripe for the picking for a man of great empathy to step in and take the reins of this country to get us to better places as a people.

In this piece, I will talk about how Joe Biden’s compassion and empathy have shaped him as a person, his policies in office so far, and how the future is looking brighter every day because we have the opportunity to Build Back Better.

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I won’t delve too much into the past. In 1972, Joe ran his first statewide campaign for public office, ousting his first incumbent Republican opponent. About a month after that though, his wife and kids were in a semi truck accident. Only his sons survived. He was so distraught, he was going to resign a position he hadn’t even been sworn into yet. It took the Majority Leader of the Senate to convince him not to quit.

In 2010, Beau Biden was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Sadly, in 2015, he succumbed to the cancer that he had battled for years. Losing a spouse and baby daughter is a point of grief I can’t imagine, but losing a grown son is just beyond me. I’ve lost people in my life to death, but no one that I loved like Joe loved his son.

Now, I refuse to talk a lot about the previous president and his time in office, but the thing that stuck out the most to me was his complete lack of qualities of basic humanity. Empathy, Sympathy, Compassion. An awareness of others suffering. These things make one capable of things like remorse and kindness, something the previous president lacked. When far right extremists marched on Charlottesville, one man said there were fine people on both sides, and one condemned the actions. The Battle for the Soul of the Nation, as Joe calls it, was well underway.

Let’s look at an example, one that is plaguing us all, The Covid-19 Virus. The previous president didn’t have a plan to deal with it, wouldn’t even wear a mask, and couldn’t do anything to comfort the families and friends of those lost to the virus, because he lacked the empathy to relate to those losses. Our current President, even before taking office, consulted with experts to come up with a plan, set a good example by wearing a mask, and held a memorial service for those lost. The power of his example, by being empathetic, shows the country that it’s okay to greve, it’s okay to mourn.

His policy so far in office looks from the other side like Joe just wanted to undo all his predecessor’s work, but if we take a closer look, you start to see that everything he’s done has been out of compassion for the people most in need. His Executive orders include things like Covid-19 response, relief, and worker protections, including a vaccination task force, another round of stimulus payments, and ordering masking in all federal workspaces. On immigration, he set up a task force to reunite families separated at the border, made it easier to migrate here and seek asylum, and strengthened DACA. To protect and preserve the very planet we call home, he rejoined the Paris Climate Agreement and reversed so many of the previous administration’s environmental laws. For LGBT+ people, he ordered all federal agencies to uphold the Supreme Court’s ruling from last year expanding the definition of sex descrimination to sexual oriantation, and reversed his predicessor’s ban on transgender people serving in the military. And the last one I’ll mention, but certainly not the least important, he opened enrollment in the healthcare market which had been cut short the year before, during a Pandemic!

All these actions and more can be traced directly to the compassion and empathy that make him Joe Biden. That is what we need right now, someone who will govern with respect for the people he is over, who will serve us instead of his own interests.

With that I come to the future, and back to Pete Buttigieg. The newly appointed Secretary of Transportation, the first openly LGBT+ person confirmed by the Senate to a cabinet position, has a lot of plans to help the Biden administration Build Back Better. He took his own town of South Bend into the future, and I can’t wait to see what he’s able to do in that position. Janet Yellen, the first woman to serve as Secretary of the Treasury, is already on the warpath against the economic impact of the pandemic. In fact, Biden’s Cabinet is the most diverse in American history, again something that can be traced to his empathy, because people who aren’t represented in government don’t feel seen.

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Now you understand why I could vote for Joe, why he’s the President we need right now, and why I’m excited about the future of our country.