Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Election Day 2008: A Great Day for Anarchy

Lately, I've decided I'm basically an anarchist. But I believe in Christ and trying to make my life bear some kind of resemblence to his, so I guess you could call me a Christian™ anarchist. If I told anyone in my family that, they'd probably flip out and pull out the Holy Water and go buy some crucifixes, trying to touch them to my forehead. You think I'm kidding! Yesterday, my dad told me to make sure I go vote today because it's my "civic duty". Until then, I'd considered not going at all. Then I thought if he was going to make a big deal out of it, then maybe I should. Now I'm back to thinking I may not just because I don't feel that strongly about supporting a system of government that I feel to be flawed. So I feel it's my "civic duty" not to participate in something until the kinks are worked out. The only problem with that is most Americans probably don't think there are kinks, so they just blindly take the plunge off the voting cliff like lemmings and are none the wiser for it. And if you try to challenge any of that, you'll be called crazy and get ignored.

George Carlin is a genius. I've watched his voting rant just enough times to barely not know the thing by heart, but he says that people have no right to tell you you don't have a right to complain if you don't vote. Why? If you don't vote, and the person elected causes a big mess, you can complain about it because it's not your fault we got screwed. That's always made perfect sense to me, as opposed to the converse that "you can't complain if you don't vote". What if you wanted to complain about the choices on the ballot? What if you wanted to complain that we're not a constitutional monarchy or a theocracy? Are you still supposed to lodge your complaint by voting? It's this kind of reasoning that makes me not want to vote. If people with that kind of shady logic vote, then wouldn't that mean I have shady logic if I vote too? Then again, I could kind of take the middle road and just do a bunch of silly write-ins or vote straight third party, that way if a Republican or Democrat screws us (which they likely will), then I can both say it's not my fault and that I have a right to complain because I did vote (not that it matters anyway since that argument was stupid to begin with).

Despite all this cynicism...I had a dream last night that I hung out one-on-one with Barack Obama and then with Sarah Palin. I met Obama in some kind of waiting room for the election...but it was like the day before. There were maybe 30 people in this waiting room and none of them noticed he was there. I was sitting in a corner and Obama came over and sat in the seats caddy corner from me. He was just wearing a ballcap, a t-shirt, windbreaker, joggin pants, and sneakers. Once he sat down, he picked up a magazine and started reading it. Not really wanting to be a nuisance, I just casually started asking him about the weather and asked him if he was ready to campaign today. He nervously eyed me and didn't say a word...almost like he wanted to say something, but since it wasn't scripted and his advisors weren't around, he didn't want to risk saying anything that could get out. But I kept trying to make conversation and he finally opened up. After a while, that had dried up again, we pulled out our iPods and sat there, waiting for him to make a speech. The only problem...he didn't really give a speech. He just sat in the waiting room and started chatting with a few of the other people in the waiting room. (Cont'd later...)

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