Okay, okay, okay…it’s gone on long enough, and I gotta crack. I’ve been trying my best to stay the hell out of this election ever since I prematurely voiced my full support for Senator Obama about fifteen columns ago (STBY # 71, “Wisdom, Love, and Obama?”). But lately, I’ve been getting attacked by the right and the left, and it’s time I give my two cents, and better yet, explain the currency of my two cents!
Let me start things off by saying, “Wow, John McCain looks really old.” And I don’t mean that he looks “cool calm and collected-old” like Paul Newman or Sean Connery do; no, no and NO; when I say that John McCain looks old, I mean he looks old in that scary “if I had children and McCain wandered up to them in a park, I’d rush over, grab them, make up some pathetic excuse, and evacuate the premises immediately” kind of way.
As for Obama, I think he looks normal, speaks incredibly well, and is certainly a most sane and rational individual blessed with a way-higher than average intelligence. And these are great, admirable qualities, so I can say with one hundred percent integrity that I respect Obama, and I also respect anyone who is voting for Obama.
I can also quite easily offer my assessment of this election in the following sentence: McCain is older than dirt, his face looks like it’s falling off, and I therefore fear that he will die in office (if elected), and this leads me to the sad conclusion that anyone voting for McCain this year is risking the election of the iconoclastic femme-fatale: Sarah “Lady MacBeth” Palin.
Don’t get me wrong, if Sarah Palin came onto me at a bar, I’d be lost in her cougar eyes; I’d be putty in her hands. But fortunately, the part of me that elects who I sleep with is not currently in charge of electing who I want to be given the power to veto congressional legislature and to also use (or misuse, as the case may be) the war powers act of 1973.
Am I being clear enough here? No, I’m not. How about this: There is no person on this Earth who is currently considered a choice for President that I would less like to see inherit the oval office than Sarah “pretty face” Palin and the Karl Rove diplomacy she represents—I would honestly rather face four more years of Bush than see Palin as our nation’s leader.
I have formed my opinion after watching about an hours worth of interview footage of Sarah Palin and her doughy eyed inability to comprehend even the most basic facets of our government; basic notions that I learned in one semester of government education during my senior year of high school. In addition, I have researched her track record and found that it features an absurdly unabashed willingness to speak dishonestly whenever it suits her best interests. You can count me out.
McCain may be a maverick, but he may also have completely sold out on his maverick ways; at this stage of the game, it seems impossible to me to make any sense of the myriad of political role-reversals McCain has pulled since his invigorating 2000 campaign quest, and this frightens me—a lot.
This frightens me because even though I don’t think either McCain or Palin are pro war, I do think that they are “anti-peaceful diplomacy,” and I think Western Civilization needs another World War, or even a Cold War, about as much as your average over-weight American needs another serving of McDonald’s…
Back to Obama. As I mentioned, I think he’s intelligent, but I also think he is far too deeply invested, for my liking, in the grandiose “LBJ Great Society” rhetoric that permeates every single speech he gives. I think it’s important to mention that Obama’s domestic policies in no way frighten me, so much as they depress me, because without LBJ’s “Great Society” programs a la the mid sixties, we wouldn’t have ridiculously crime infested ghettos and poorly run bureaucratic government agencies that absolutely waste our tax money.
I see four years of Obama as a step in the wrong direction for my most chief complaint about American culture; our lack of self-responsibility. We shouldn’t let people fall through the cracks, but big government creates its own system, which in turn creates the very cracks, leaks, and holes that we “don’t want anyone of our populace to fall into.” And most, if not all of our government agencies that were designed to assist and aid the underprivileged are horribly mismanaged; they are bureaucratic messes that waste not only our money, but a lot of human energy and effort as well.
So if a gun were put to my head, which it is NOT, (contrary to nearly every single one of my peers opinions), I think the choice between Obama and McCain has become a very easy choice to make in the last few weeks. Sure, McCain would promote a return to nuclear energy, which the way I see things, is the one and only solution to our global warming and oil dependency issues, but I’m not willing to sacrifice the goal of a more peaceful world in lieu of cheaper energy, so if push ever came to shove, I’d vote for Obama over McCain.
But guess what? Push never comes to shove in a republic with open elections, and there is no law declaring our electoral process as a binary system, with only two candidates to choose between. No, it is a ridiculous and uniquely-American obsession that goads our populace like lemmings towards a cliff into thinking that every four years, if you choose to vote, you must choose between two candidates. And this idée fixe will only ever change when we, the individual lemmings, stop heading towards the cliff.
Obama promoters, gather round, and explain to me how you can punch the sky with your fist, and chant “change,” and truly believe in said change, but then ridicule and taunt me, the independent voter, with vague threats when I espouse my desire to vote for a third party? If you really want independent voters like me to join team Obama, perhaps you should re think the psychology of using misleading, myopic, and pessimism-fueled statements like the following: “It’s a two party system, it has become that way, and it’s not going to change, at least not this election, so if you vote third party, you are wasting your vote.” My vote cannot be “wasted,” because my vote is a representation of my desire to elect a candidate of my choice. My vote is not some magic ticket to Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, and neither is yours.
The way I see it, my only goal in any election is to push as many career politicians out of their offices as possible, and the best and most effective way for me to do this is to vote for independent candidates who don’t owe their votes to campaign donors and lobbyists.
Obama has borrowed a lot of change in order to advertise his message of change; and these campaign donations will cripple his ability to carry through on many of his campaign promises, mark my words. Or just look at what Pelosi and the Democrats promised “us” in 2006, and then look now—here in 2008—at how many of these promises have been fulfilled. I can count them all on one hand, and it too is forming a fist.
I am an independent voter because I fear the “mob mentality” behind any major mass movement, and also because I despise the sloth-like and pathetically inept bureaucracies that both of our major parties tend to promote.
As an independent voter, I relish in my right to carefully think about and then to carefully choose who to vote for in an election. As hard as it is to believe, I don’t belong to “your” team or to the “other” team; I think both teams are full of corrupt morons who can’t do something I learned to do at the age of sixteen: appropriately budget my spending in order to remain out of debt.
If you are an American who believes in change, but not in the possibility of a third party winning any major election, then I beg you to please pull your head up and out of the tiny, suffocating box that you dwell in, and realize that change can happen in increments, as you say, but change can also occur in a sudden and dramatic fashion. Change occurs when enough individual changes occur to create a collective, noticeable change—and it really is that simple.
Strange, bizarre, and “seemingly impossible” changes occur all the time, we just tend to ignore them because most Americans seem to be pessimistic by nature (I have no idea why, since our nation has more of everything than any other nation on Earth).
The internet went from a technology devoid of profit margins, and ridiculed by corporate America to the main way that almost every American does business, and this happened in a very short period of time because more and more individuals started to use it, and then one day; Blamo! It was suddenly the best and most efficient way to do business!
The Berlin Wall practically fell overnight, but it crumbled slowly, over time, as more and more individuals became frustrated with the corrupt USSR government, and finally after forty years of “cold war,” what had once seemed “impossible” happened; Gorbechev destroyed the system from the inside and the East shook hands with the West.
India, without amassing an army or using any force, was able to end nearly ninety years of British colonialism, and again, this result was produced by individual protest.
So I ask anyone and everyone who is obsessed with change, but equally obsessed with denying the legitimacy of a third party candidate, meaning a candidate who isn’t a product of, nor part of the very system we all have grown to loathe; why do you castrate yourself with the tunnel-vision belief that if you vote third party, you are tossing away your vote?
In my opinion, every single American who goes to the ballot box this November who elects to not vote for a Democrat or a Republican is giving themselves the honor and the privilege of extending a metaphorical middle finger to all of the fat cat politicians who are running and ruining our local and national governments.
And if enough of us vote third party, trust me, they’ll take notice, because the only thing a politician tries hard at is to buy your loyalty and your vote, and so long as you perpetuate their two party system, they don’t have to do much to retain your loyalty, and that’s why our government is failing us.
If you believe in the fundamental spirit that encouraged our founding fathers to tell George III and Britain to “fuck off,” and if you further believe in the time honored tradition of non-violent, civil protest, then you should try voting for a third party! For in doing so, you are not “allowing someone else to win,” but rather, you are personally standing up to the masses and declaring that you are tired of the two party circus and its coercive force, and you are opting to vote for real change, like an end to more than fifty years of ineffective, obtuse, and corrupt government.
I refuse to be bullied by the left or the right into “choosing between one of your two candidates,” because the simple, fact of the matter is that I don’t particularly like any of the candidates who are running. To paraphrase the band Radiohead, I think both major party candidates “make pretty speeches,” and that’s about all I think they’re capable of doing because our government is completely clogged with corruption and both Republicans and Democrats seem to think that the way to unclog a toilet is by shoving more and more toilet paper and crap into it. Maybe we should elect a plumber to the oval office!
I vote in affirmation of things I like, not for things that oppose things I “don’t like.” And that’s not just my philosophy and my choice, but also my constitutional right. So every time in the past, and especially recently, when someone who is voting “against” Bush or “against” McCain has tried to convince me to do the same, all I tend to hear is “baah baaah [insert republican here]” and all that I tend to see is your finger, pointing towards a cliff; and I refuse to perpetuate the ridiculous two party cycle we’ve fallen into.
If you really like Obama, and you believe that he will best represent your interests as our 44th President then please go out there and vote for him! I’m happy so long as a voter is voting for who they want to elect as their representative. What worries me is when people think it’s better to vote against another candidate, in lieu of proactively supporting the real changes that they want to see, because this turns our electoral system into a game, which is exactly what our corrupt officials depend on to retain their offices!
And for those of you who still think that I am throwing away my vote, and especially for those of you who are somehow angered by my political choice to vote for who I like, and not for who I think “can win,” I sincerely wish you the best of luck in a life wherein you believe that in order for change to occur it must be well organized, must already have a large following in order for you to join it, and that it must be issued as a directive from the top down. But that is a depressing attitude that I will not adopt.
I think that this philosophy on the mechanics of change is inordinately pessimistic and dour; and I can’t imagine what it feels like to live in a world wherein you feel surrounded by goliaths and with no David in site; but I implore you to realize your individual strength in regards to creating collective change; for change starts with you, "David."