Robert Owens
For a Change, Throw Your Vote Away
By
Jul 30, 2008 - 10:14:22 AM

I don’t know about you, but I’m hoping for change because change is so different and staying the same is so, you know, so the same.  I’m like, really, really excited that for once we have the opportunity to vote for change, otherwise all we ever get is things not changing and that’ll just leave everything, you know, like, the same and that would be so unchanged. How would we have any hope? I mean what we need is hope for a change, right?  And change will give us hope, so I’m hoping for change!  And I’m excited about it, too! As faceless drones marching along putting one more brick in the wall we’ve come to expect and accept political New-speak.

Not long ago, I ran for the Virginia State Senate.  I advanced a platform advocating taking our government back from the bureaucrats and professional politicians who have shanghaied the Old Dominion, the mother of Presidents, and the original site of the greatest experiment in human freedom ever attempted.  

Campaigning every day for 11 months and spending my family into poverty against a long-time incumbent who forgot to campaign, I ran as an Independent.  Describing the differences between myself and our absentee leader was easy. “If he’s for it, I’m against it; if he’s against it, I’m for it.” During the race, I sought the endorsement of state-elected officials who line up with the values and programs I advocated.  None of them would endorse my election in public.  Several told me privately they agreed with me and hoped I would win, but since I wasn’t running as a member of their particular side of the one-coin political party that’s gerrymandered its way into perpetual re-election, the Republicrats, they couldn’t publicly endorse me.  When all was said, I was done, losing the race two-to-one.  

Since the election, several of these paragons of political bravery have told me privately, “I wish you would have won.  If people could only see what we see, what an embarrassment that man is.  When he shows up, he sleeps through meetings, and even when he’s the chair of a committee and after more than a dozen years in the Senate, he just doesn’t seem to understand what’s going on.”  A slap on my back and a wistful “Maybe next time,” and they slide back into the swamp we call the General Assembly.  The fix is in.  Who’s kidding who?  Between the media that ignores or ridicules anyone outside the Republicrats, the corporations lining up to line the pockets of transparently self-serving Election Committees and the inertia of a populace not only apathetic but militantly apathetic (“I don’t care about anything and I can’t stand anyone who does!”) what chance does the minority who are engaged have at re-capturing our government?  

What can we do besides studying Spanish, buying green products with zero transfats, and choosing between someone who has people fainting at his evangelistic campaigns while he says nothing and a guy who looks like he’s walking in his sleep and sounds like he has a hard time reading his teleprompter?  

There are several third party candidates running in this election.  Some of them sound as if they have thought about what they’re saying and live like they might believe it.  I know we’re taught that voting outside the monopoly is “throwing your vote away.”  I bought that line so many times I’m embarrassed.  But no more!  When we can see where we’re headed over a cliff trying to put on the brakes isn’t a bad idea.  People say even if a third party ever did win the presidency, they’d never get anything done.  Sounds good to me. Doing nothing would be an improvement over what we get now, and voting for the lesser of two evils is still voting for evil.  Though I’ve come to the conclusion the first 537 names out of the phone book would give us a better federal government then we have, I’m still an advocate of voting. I say find a leader who has some ideas and some integrity, then support them.  As to the idea that minority parties can’t win? In 1860, Lincoln, the candidate of a third party, only won 40% of the vote.  But that was enough to change the world.

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