politics

Letter To A Friend Who Is Not Voting

Over lunch, you told me that you were not planning to vote next Tuesday. The slight smile on your face told me that you knew what our reaction to this would be, that you knew there would be a stunned silence followed by a barrage of expostulation and argument. You knew, and you were prepared for it. You had your reasons straight, and I found I couldn’t argue with you then. I am, however, prepared to argue with you now.

We were talking about our Congressional candidates, and you said that you could not with good conscience support either of them. Honestly, neither can I. The constant influx of negative campaigning would have been enough by itself, but when I sat down last night to actually review their politics in detail, I confess that I almost drank myself into a coma. They are both pro-life, they are both pro-war, the differences between them boil down to a few inconsequentialities and my sense of a new hatred struggling with one which has stood for eight years.

You said, “Who are you going to pick to be your Leader? Who’s gonna be your Daddy?” and the anarchist spirit in me sat up and started asking how far down the river I had sold my soul just to try to reach something a little better than what we have, and whether it was worth it. Why am I so proudly insisting that it is every American’s duty to march into that booth on Tuesday and mark a choice for a person to lead the nation whom they would never choose to lead a Boy Scout fundraiser? Continue reading

Who’s Breaking The Will Of The American People?

Just two weeks to go until the mid-term elections, and the political climate is (as we Americans have come to expect) rapidly degenerating into a quagmire of finger pointing and name calling, as each “side” tries to blame the other for all the turmoil the average citizen hears in the evening news. Recently, the conservative trend has been to try to blame the liberals for the upsurge in violence in Iraq. In a recent interview, Vice President Dick Cheney, speaking from his White House office was quoted as saying:

I think they’re very much aware of our political calendar here, I really do. And when you see the kinds of things that happened this year, for example, when the Democratic Party in Connecticut purged Joe Lieberman, in effect, drummed him out of the party on the grounds that he had supported the President in the global war on terror, that sends a message to the terrorists overseas that their basic strategy of trying to break the will of the American people may, in fact, work.

Now, ignoring for the moment the blatant lapse in logic of this sentiment, let’s consider the will of the American people, and what might be happening to break it.

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