Election Woes

Happy All Souls’ Day!

I am back from vacation; I am very behind on… just about everything, I guess. The book reviews, the Saturday Notes, and posting photos. I take too many photos; I should have in the next month over a thousand photos onto Facebook. I hope to clean up the camera cards too, as YALLFest is coming up.

Also, there’s a new Dragon Age out? Someone let me know how it is.

I voted early this week. One of the benefits of vacation was almost hearing nothing about the election, but it is the subject of the Note. I apologize.

Election Woes

It feels cliched at this point to complain that our major party candidates are not ideal. I’m sure you can find dozens of articles about the various faults of the candidates, if you want something specific. Lord knows, people are angry and determined enough to write all those think pieces. I don’t want to go into my own issues with the candidates, at least not here.

But there is something that’s really been bothering me about the election, and US elections in general, the more I think about it:

We keep kicking the can down the road.

There is rhetoric that pops up in every election; the whole, “This is the most important election of our lifetime,” “Vote like your life depends on it, because it does,” and I’m not saying that those sorts of things aren’t true, in some circumstances, but hearing it every election dilutes the impact and makes it sound very insincere.

More frustrating, though, is this notion of, “Well, this isn’t the perfect candidate, but you have to vote for this person because at least you have a chance of getting what you want.” Again, this would be more convincing if we didn’t hear it every single election cycle. That this or that candidate isn’t actually one we agree with on the topics that matter to us, but with this candidate, we have a chance to get this issue noticed.

And I’m tired of this! I am sick and tired of one election after another of major candidates I don’t like, because maybe, just maybe, it’s a baby step in the right direction. I understand, of course, that when it comes to political battles on important issues, it is often won by inches. I get that; victories don’t come all at once. At the same time, it often feels like those victories are simply not coming at all, only vaguely waved at. We’re still torturing people in Guantanamo Bay, for instance, and it’s no longer even a talking point in the national conversation.

I read an essay on Terry Pratchett and Discworld where the writer said something like, “As we all know, Progress cannot be stopped! Society will always continue to progress, to get better!” And that’s… a far from guaranteed thing, and I am struggling to understand why someone would think that everything will always continue to get better, rather than look at society as a thing that goes back and forth.

[Admittedly, Catholic me thinks, like Tolkien, that the world has been slowly descending into a worse state since the Fall.]

No, the world getting better, becoming more moral, is not guaranteed. Far from it. So this idea that if you continue to vote for the right candidate, or more realistically, the not-wrong candidate, that the Good Thing you want or need will eventually come along… that’s not convincing.

In a fully functional system, we’d look at candidates who really aren’t to our liking and say, “Well, no, I don’t like you–I’ll pick someone I do like.” But our two-party system is so encompassing that we’ve made it, for all practical purposes, a binary between two candidates, one of which we’re meant to celebrate for not being the other. I hate this, I hate that outlook, and I hate how I keep getting major party candidates I can’t really feel comfortable voting for (or in some cases, I think actively and immediately harmful to vote for).

I hate it. Hate it, hate it, hate it.

—