Do your Thanksgiving plans pass the deathbed test?

There will be three empty seats at my family's Thanksgiving table. My husband, his little brother and my father all died in one year's time. If they were alive, they wouldn't miss it for the world. In addition, there will be no sweet dog under the table waiting for someone to drop food. If he were alive and well, even he wouldn't miss it.

I assume if you're reading this, you're alive. In my opinion, being dead is the only good reason for missing a Thanksgiving dinner you would have attended had the presidential election results been different. Some of you were planning to be there but you're following the advice of many disgruntled Harris voters and rejecting your family and/or friends because they voted for Trump. Please take more time to think before doing something you can't take back. 

And if you're a Trump voter who won't shut up about how his winning is the greatest, please appease your loved one who is upset about how you voted, stuff your mouth with turkey, and let it go for a day. 

I understand these things can be very upsetting, and I empathize. I've been there. The presidential candidate I voted for hasn't won my state since I began voting in 1984. Sometimes my candidate won the general election, but I've been on the losing side of the presidential election five times. I doubt many voters have had uninterrupted winning streaks, so we've all been where you are now, and it sucks. 

Since the election, there's been a lot of bad advice going around leading people to do some pretty distressing things. Women shaving their heads; vowing to abstain from sex; saying they wrote off their sister "and it felt so good;" people ending online "friendships" with people they now consider Nazis; grieving, confused parents reeling after being told by their children not to set a place for them at a holiday table ever again because of how they voted.

On MSNBC, a psychiatry resident affiliated with Yale advised people to skip the holidays with family if they voted for Trump. “To say, ‘I have a problem with the way that you voted because it went against my very livelihood, and I’m not going to be around you this holiday, I need to take some space for me,’” she said. 

"Take some space for me" when it's not all about you because there are other people at that table.

If you're disappointed, upset or devastated about the election results, you've had a couple of weeks to deal with your feelings. So now it's time to do a little exercise: 

• Picture yourself on your deathbed. (It may be easy for those who've faced their own mortality or who've experienced loss. It may be harder for the young or those who've never lost anyone, but try to picture it anyway.) Pretend someone who loves you is there holding your hand and asks, "Is there anything you regret? 
  
  
• Dig deep and be honest with yourself.  If you dump family or friends because of this election, will you think of the person you rejected in 2024 and deeply regret it on your deathbed?
  
  
• Ask yourself: Will you be able to fix it, make it right? As someone who lost my best friend to politics, I can say from experience that deathbed reconciliations, while better than nothing, ring hollow because of the time lost before your loved one died. I thought we'd have time to fix our friendship when cooler heads prevailed, but she got sick and died. Love isn't a faucet you can turn on and off. Though you're estranged from your loved one, chances are if one of you is leaving this earth, love will win. 
  
  
• Ask yourself why you're choosing loss for a politician who'll never know your name. I promise Kamala Harris won't be by your side holding your hand as you pass. The same goes for Donald Trump. No matter how much time, money or emotion you've poured into this election, you don't know or love these people. They don't love you.
  
  
• It's time to get real, and the only thing in this world that's real is love. If you love someone, or if you are loved by someone and you're willing to throw it away over politics, you'll probably live to regret it. Ask yourself if you'd rather have a few difficult discussions about your differing politics or die with regret.
  
  
• What if it's not you on the deathbed? Maybe it's your grandma, one of your parents or, God forbid, a child. Maybe you won't be there holding their hand at the end because you let something as ephemeral as the politics of this moment destroy the love in your real life. Maybe sudden death will take away the chance for a deathbed reconciliation, and you'll be left with no choices at all. Just loss.
  
  
• Think about your family gathered around the Thanksgiving table and know that any one of them could be gone by next year. This could be your last chance.

Indulge my lecture because I know loss. I'm a relatively young widow who had no close girlfriends to help me through it because I'm the only one of us who made it out of her 50's. The last few years have been a growing snowball of death, and I know it's not over. Your parent or grandparent would likely die for you. They might give you more than they can afford to give to keep you from being homeless or hungry. Your real friends, the ride-or-die kind who've been with you through everything aren't replaceable. These people and the love they have for you are a gift, and as the saying goes, they aren't like busses. There won't be another one coming in 10 minutes.

So please rethink your decision to end relationships with loved ones over this election or any future one. I know the stakes were high. I know each side believed this was the most important election of their lifetimes. I believed it. I've been around long enough to bet this won't be the last time we believe it.  

If your post-election relationship problems don't pass the deathbed test, then please suck it up and spend Thanskgiving with your family. Realize that though you think you're punishing them by skipping Thanksgiving, you're hurting yourself too. Try to make a pact with your loved ones not to discuss it. If Uncle Joe won't shut up about it, don't punish mom and dad for it. They'd throw themselves in front of a train for you, so get on one and go see them. 

Our loved ones may die and leave us, but our regrets won't. If you decide to go to Thanksgiving dinner with despite your political differences--even though it's hard, even if it's not fun--I bet you won't regret it on your deathbed.

What life is like under Harris-Walz

How could we know? Those of us who live in Minnesota know. We've lived under the federal policies of Biden-Harris for almost four years. We've lived under the control of Governor Tim Walz for six years. Combine the effects of those two sets of elected leaders, and we have life under Harris-Walz. I don't think this is what joy feels like. Please learn from us and work to make sure this destructive duo doesn't bring their brand of joy to your lives too.

Minnesota has made national headlines in recent years for all the wrong reasons. We used to be known as the birthplace of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, and Prince. Now, we're known as the birthplace of the Defund the Police movement. 

First I, then my mother, were widowed 364 days apart under Harris-Walz. Life for us has become increasingly hard because of the failed leadership of these two.

Unfortunately, an accurate picture of life under Harris-Walz requires some math. 

"Bidenomics" was repeatedly touted by Vice President Kamala Harris as "working,"  We two Mnnesota widows have had to deal with Walz' penchant for raising taxes coupled with Biden-Harris' inflationary policies that have made life very expensive, not just for us, but for everyone. Minnesota boasts the 8th largest income tax rate and the highest corporate tax rate in the nation. People are fleeing in droves.

My mom has spent the two winters since dad died rationing her heating oil, which went up by a staggering 99.6 percent between Biden-Harris taking office and my father's death in 2022. She keeps her thermostat in the 50s during cold winter nights. My property taxes are skyrocketing, so my house payment rises. Cost of upkeep rises. The same thing is happening to my mom.

The week after my father died, my 81-year-old mother was back at the job from which she had retired to ask for it back. Now age 83 and a recent cancer survivor, she holds three jobs. She said, "Because of inflation and taxes, it's almost like I didn't go back to [the aformentioned job]. It's a wash financially." Thus the other two jobs.

"But inflation is going down!" people say, while they mean, "prices are going down." They're not. They're up 20 percent because inflation should be added up year over year.* If inflation is down to 3.2 percent from its high of 8.0 in 2022, it doesn't mean prices are going down, it just means they're going up at a lower rate. (We really need to do something about our education system because this shouldn't have to be Dick-and-Janed to anyone.)

Walz has passsed an ungodly amount of tax hikes. He's repeatedly raised taxes (despite a growing surplus) on the middle class while enacting an insanely expensive green agenda. The MN Department of Health and Human Services has been embroiled in an unbelieveable amount of scandal during Walz' tenure, the most recent of which involves $250 million in stolen COVID funds meant to go toward feeding hungry children. No hungry children were fed. Walz has been issued subpoenas by three federal agencies regarding the scandal.

Speaking of scandals, under Tim Walz, our beautiful city, Minneapolis, is so crime-ridden and in many places, desolate, that many people who don't live in it don't want to go there, or do so only if they absoutely have to. Many who live there have lost their businesses or livelihoods forever. 

"Crime is down. The numbers prove it!" people will say. But when Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) numbers are calculated correctly, crime is up. Since 2020, the Minnesota BCA numbers show violent crime has gone up by 23.3 percent statewide.** And nobody can claim "crime's going down now," because it dropped by a lesser percentage in 2023 (6.1) than 2022 (8.6), so it's going UP. Tim Walz has overseen all of it.

If you live in a city outside of Minnesota that was burned, looted, destroyed and/or not rebuilt in 2020, you have Tim Walz to blame. He took three days to call in the National Guard during the Floyd riots, and when he was asked to do it he disparaged the guard by saying they were not highly-trained soldiers but were just "19-year-olds who are cooks." Nice words for a man who "proudly served" 24 years in the Army National Guard. 

He ordered the police at the 3rd Precinct to "stand down" and flee, to let it burn. I remember watching it and saying to my husband, "this is going to set a precident for the nation." I'm not psychic, just awake. Walz helped launch the Defund the Police movement, a local cancer that metastasized nationally post Floyd and helped increase crime and deflate morale among police everywhere.

This is just a small sample of the joys of living under Harris-Walz. Walz gave us snitch lines meant to pit neighbor against neighbor; he seized and held onto emergency powers with an iron grip, only relinquishing them after the MN Senate wrestled them away after 17 months; he signed more than 100 executive orders during that reign of power; his mandate to send COVID-positive patients to nursing/care homes caused preventable deaths of the elderly and disabled giving MN the highest percentage of COVID deaths at nursing facilities in the country; millions of missing COVID money; rampant scandals; making MN a "sanctuary state for transgender youth" sanctioning state kidnapping of children and stripping away parental rights; our sanctuary state status making us a magnet for illegal migrants after we already took in huge numbers of refugees, straining all of our resources from medical care to schools.

Harris gave us tie-breaking votes in congress that caused high inflation; Bidenomics, which threw the American dream into the dustbin of history; the fastest growing segment of job seekers are retirees; food shelves meant for the hungry struggling to keep up with demand; families becoming homeless due to exploding rent and mortgage rates; expensive gas, electricity, and heating oil; wars breaking out around the world; 350 million missing children; a border open not only to those yearning to breathe free, but to those who seek to destroy us, even if its one woman or child at a time. 

Our lives under Harris-Walz could be yours if we don't vote to stop it.

The good news is that America has been in bad shape before and recovered. Minneapolis was dubbed "Murderapolis" in the 90s, but crime had come down significantly by the end of Republican Tim Pawlenty's two terms as governor. The gas lines and exploding interest rates of the Carter years led to the Reagan recovery because people were sick of their plummeting standard of living and voted their way out of it.

We can do this. We too can vote our way out of this. We need to do it. My mom can't work forever, and I will lose the home my husband and I worked so hard for if this doesn't turn around. Our children, grandchilden and great-grandchildren deserve a future that's much better than life is now. 

I hear there are about three persuadable people in the country right now. But since my family has lost three Republican men since the last presidential election, I'm hoping to persuade at least three people to vote Republican if they haven't yet, or if they were planning to sit it out, please don't. Hungry children and exhausted widows are depending on you. We could use some joy.

*Using Consumer Price Index numbers, when Trump left office, inflation was at 1.2%. For the years 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 respectively, the equation is: +4.7+8.0+4.1+3.2=20%. 

**Violent crime in MN year over year for 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 respectively: +17.2+21.6-8.6-6.9=+23.3. When crime shoots up by 38.8% over two years, it's dropping by a collective 15.5% over the next two years isn't a net drop but a significant gain.