My best friend Gini, like me, was a public school teacher. After every mass shooting, where the shooter either killed himself or had the police do it — death by cop, she used to say, “You couldn’t cut out the middleman… Why did you have to take some of us with you?”

J. D. Vance says that he is doing “God’s work — and if that leads to the end times, OK.”

My response to him, “If you’re ready to go, just go. Don’t take any of us with you. Leave us alone.”

Discussing the war in Iran, which he, virtually single-handedly, started, Donald Trump says, “It’s all just small potatoes to me.”

I say, “Tell that to the loved ones of the eighteen servicemen and women killed in your war.” And, lest we forget, the 750 others who were wounded.

I was going to write about these “end times” that we may be living in. How the current, widespread, rampant invasion of the spotted lanternfly felt portentous, like a glimpse at an ominous and foreboding future. Perhaps biblical?

I was going to tally all the damage that Trump and the nearly entire sycophantic Republican Party have caused, right down to the destruction of our nation’s capital. All the damage that seems to permeate our country’s psyche — such anger and depression we suffer from over ten years of Trump’s abuse.

I was going to list all those injuries and make this essay a rallying cry, urging the reader to vote all of them out and not be a single-issue voter, not look for consensus with every candidate on everything that concerns you, but I veered off. Who were the nineteen American servicemen and women whose deaths were not “small potatoes?”

This is who they were:

Private Isabella Gonzalez (19)
First Lieutenant Tyler James Feehan (25)
Captain Cody A. Khork (25)
Sergeant 1st Class Noah L. Tietjens (42)
Sergeant 1st Class Nicole M. Amos (39)
Major Jeffrey O’Brien (45)
Chief Warrant Officer 3 Robert Marzan (54)
Major John “Alex” Klinner (33)
Captain Ariana Savino (31)
Technical Sergeant Ashley Pruitt (34)
Captain Seth Koval (38)
Captain Curtis Angst (30)
Master Sergeant Tyler Simmons (28)
Commander Gabriel Edwards (42)
Sergeant Angel S. Rampersad (28)
Sergeant Michael Emmanuel Swinton (30)
Sergeant Benjamin N. Pennington (26)
Sergeant Declan J. Coady (20)
Army Capt. Bianca C. Wilkerson (37)

The midterm elections are fast approaching. In Massachusetts, the start date for mail-in ballots is Oct. 4 with the required start date for early in-person voting, Oct. 17. The power of choice. Who will win the struggle for control of the state governments and the U.S. Congress? Who will win this election with its results that will reverberate beyond our borders?

In these times, this is an election that will have momentous consequences. Anything but “small potatoes.” Just ask the loved ones of our fallen servicemen and women.

Barbara A. Rouillard is a retired public school teacher who lives in Springfield.