Unpaid Political Rant

This will be an uncharacteristically serious entry. I try to keep politics and religion out of my blog and stick only with the tried and true subjects of craftiness and inappropriate sexual innuendo. So perhaps we should think of this entry as a solicitor's unwanted knock on the door during a particularly poignant episode of Dexter.

This evening, I couldn't sleep, and I made the mistake of reading the news. I stopped reading after a particularly maddening news story which will not get much attention unless I belabor the point. To wit: we can only hope that the people who did this have been overrun by a threshing machine somewhere. And it occurred to me to take a brief moment and discuss the current political climate. Because right now I'm in an Up With People mood.

I think I heard somewhere recently that 90 percent of voters say they vote on 'gut instinct'. This is the same unerring guage used to gamble, buy stock, and pick one of several successive soul mates.

Now, I'm all for romance and I'm all for instinct, in their place. But the destructive human instinct that caused at least three or four young males to get together and massacre sea lions (because if one person did that, it would have to be someone not unlike The Incredible Hulk, with enough arms to hold down a 300-pound animal and then aim at its head with a blunt instrument) for fun is not something to be proud of.

I am not saying that voters who perform their civic duty on instinct are of the same moral fiber as those killers, but I am saying that instinct is tragically fallible. It's not sacred, it's not from God or the devil, it's not the guiding principle that led our Founding Fathers to create this nation.

Voting is a privilege and it's a serious endeavor. It's not something done to get a sticker or to spite a misguided friend or to keep someone else from winning or even to say, I did it. Voting is something that takes intellect, understanding, thought, and commitment to one's own principles. It is about choice.

That said, and with apologies to most people taking the time to read this, I will admit that I'm really disheartened by the talk of personality in this election. Personality is for crap. It's useless. I don't care about it. I don't have to be my President's friend, I don't have to think he's funny, I don't have to think she's vulnerable, I don't have to think he's pretty. What I do have to think is that the President is committed to the principles I'm committed to, that the President has decisiveness, humility, the spirit of cooperation, a belief in ideals, but not to the extent that they run over harsh reality. I don't care if my President likes the Knicks, eats cottage cheese, prefers cats over dogs, thinks pink is a groovy color, or saw a UFO (an object which is not identified, but could be a helicopter or a reflection). I don't care if my President can dance or if my President watches Project Runway. It's none of my business whether my President likes the missionary position or the handcuff position. I don't care.

In my humble opinion, we've gotten into this mess because we keep mistaking politics for entertainment. The political realm is for the exercise of power to effect policy. It impacts people's LIVES. Whether you pay attention to it or not, politics intimately effects us and our kids' and our animals' and our planet's LIVES. It's not about who's got hair, who's got ovaries or who's got a suspicious-sounding middle name.

I hope to think carefully before I vote, and not let gut instinct rule. Because I suspect gut instinct is how we got into this mess in the first place.