WHAT’S WITH THIS ELECTORATE?

 

I remember thinking, ‘now we’re in for it!’, when George W. Bush got reelected in 2004, over the erudite Senator John Kerry from Massachusetts, and now, after Senator Obama’s thumping in the Pennsylvania Primary last night, I’m experiencing the worst kind of deja vu: Haven’t I had this nightmare before?

Why is it that people scream, “Change, we want change,” and then when they are presented with candidates, opportunities for endemic change, change that goes to the heart of our problems, they get cold feet? Are these the same people that, “cling to their guns and religion”, when times get rough? The same people that  are afraid to leave their houses without a firearm strapped to their belts, the so-called Christians,  so afraid of their neighbors and in fact their own true natures that they have to go to mass every Sunday to ward off  their urge to be the real bastards they are– and that they would be, if they didn’t drown their worse natures in holy water? 

Nobody has much trouble understanding the crooked cop or the big city police department crippled by corruption. We’ve seen all the movies, “Serpico”, and “Prince of the City”, all the mob movies that tell us, “You can’t fight city hall” or “buck the system”, that make it painfully clear that the golden rule, “He who has the gold makes the rules”,  still holds sway. So why can’t we apply the same logic to our elected representatives in Washington, D.C.? Is it that we don’t see it on a daily basis in the flesh? Is it that we don’t want to assign the same mere-mortal fallibility to our esteemed congressmen, senators and even presidents, men and women that went to ivy-league law schools, that told us they would fight for us, for our best interests once in office? Do we not want to believe such things of the “best” of us, because then what would that say about us, about what our political system has devolved into?

If there was ever a time for change, if there ever was a time of opportunity for an unconventional presidential candidate to have a chance, isn’t this it? Isn’t it? We had a few candidates of change in the field at the start of this campaign season. On the Republican side we had Rep. Ron Paul, whose supporters proudly and rightfully put forth his uncompromising voting record as proof of his integrity and capability to lead this country. On the other side of the aisle we had people like Kucinich and Gravel, who spoke truth about the, “broken system” in D.C. Even a Washington insider like Joe Biden shook his weary head and conceded that unless we went about the business of fixing the system nothing was likely to change. And John Edwards, who came out fighting like the bulldog we need, most consistently had the special interest problem in his cross hairs. But let’s face it, where are all these people now? The only one left is Barack Obama, and that’s why I support him.

Nobody, at least, nobody with any sense, thinks Barack Obama walks on water. Yeah, he’s a good speaker, yeah he’s got a charisma, but those qualities only give him an edge when it comes to presentation; if you’re listening to what he’s saying you know that he consistently brings the discussion back to the lobbying in D.C that, put simply, amounts to bribery, and that in turn puts the interests of the American people on hold for yet another day. It keeps our medicine damn near cost-prohibitive, our health insurance inadequate, and the manufacturers of firearms operating with impunity, our price of gasoline at record highs one day after another, which gets us into wars like the one in Iraq, that has claimed the lives of over 4,000 of our young men and women and seriously injured over 30,000 more, and that by many estimations, has taken the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians and displaced over 1,000,000 more, largely consisting of that country’s destroyed middle class. A country that by Western standards would have been considered one of the best in the Arab world before our first attack and before the relentless, U.S. imposed embargos that followed for the next ten-plus years,  one of the most advanced of the Arab countries, blasted and starved and denied medicines and technology into the Dark Ages.  

America is for sale, and you can’t afford it, and nothing will change until we hang a “Closed For Business” sign on the steps of the Capitol and start doing a better job of looking out for the needs of the American people, just because we can; like the one honest cop in a corrupt precinct who doesn’t take money just for the hell of it, just out of some old fashioned idea about right and wrong and fairness. Sound a little corny, a little too Kumbayah? Fine Pennsylvania, my home state, you can afford to see it that way. You can afford to stay home on the most important voting day you’ve had since November 2004. Only half of the eligible voters of that state are registered, and only half of them bothered to show up at the polls yesterday. Only one-fourth of you who could vote yesterday, did. But it’s not fair of me to single out Pennsylvania since those percentages are pretty standard across the country.

But the next time that one of you wants to complain about gas prices or prescription prices or the fact that your job has been phased-out or shipped overseas, those of us who vote in every election without fail, despite the fact that it will most certainly mean a bout with jury duty, won’t want to hear it. And those of you who did cast your vote, but did it because of race or gender, listen up! You’re holding us back! The weight of your ignorance and prejudice and fear is a burden the rest of this country can no longer afford to bear.