Tuesday, November 2, 2010

My First-Ever Public Political Rant

Today is election day, and I am anxious. Maine looks to be poised to acquire an ignorant, short-sighted philistine as governor. Meanwhile, his Democratic and Independent rivals threaten to split the opposition vote. Practically nothing makes me angrier than knowing that big-business money is silently manipulating working-class and laboring citizens to vote against their own best interests, but that is what is happening, and it makes me sick.

I am a liberal voter, but I am not particularly political in any overt way. I don't put signs in my yard, and I live peaceably alongside my conservative Christian neighbors. They are the parents of my children's friends, the people who answer ambulance calls and plow out driveways and coach Farm League teams and fix chainsaws and let me visit their classrooms to read poems and sing songs with their kids. I care about them as human beings. And that's why I get so angry at the Tea Party's manipulations. How dare you lie to my neighbors about the Constitution and the nationality of our president? How dare you teach my neighbors to revoke their rights to health care and clean air?

I'll be voting for the Independent Eliot Cutler today. Usually I vote the straight Democratic ticket; but according to all the polls I've seen (not to mention the groundswell among my liberal acquaintances), Cutler clearly has a better chance to defeat Republican Paul LePage. I hate the idea of voting against rather than for, but that's the way it has to be this year.

So on this election day, when I am pessimistic and angry, I just want to say that I'm standing up for the oppressed--the people who are voting for a candidate I despise--these people who don't even know that they're oppressed. Their party of choice is teaching them to poison their own wells, and that's an appalling immorality.

5 comments:

Scott said...

I'll vote when I get home from work. It's going to be strange, not seeing my father in law at the polls. He used to watch over the ballot box.

Dawn Potter said...

Yes, I loved seeing him there. He did more than watch over that box: he presided.

Ruth said...

So many of the comments you wrote could have been written by me here in NH. While some of the circumstances are a bit different, the general big picture is the same.

Dawn Potter said...

Here's an email I received from a Canadian friend:

"Read your blog today and I'm sure the current climate is discouraging. I'm an outsider to your country and its politics, but on the off chance that it helps and doesn't sound patronizing or condescending (or, heaven help me, misinformed), it has been through worse periods. One is the late 19th century, encompassing the era of Teddy Roosevelt's Robber Barons, etc., and a Congress (and, I think, Senate) that if it wasn't openly corrupt, might as well have been. (It prompted Mark Twain's comment something to the effect that "I think I can say, and say with pride, that our legislators command the highest prices in the world.") Politics there has, as far as I can tell, always been a bit of a messy, manipulative business. (Lincoln during his time was reviled by the press in ways that we'd recoil from now, even given your modern media's penchant for such.)

All of which is just another way of saying that although I believe your country and its people will find their way through, my sympathies for the current situation and what I hope are short term losses and pain. You and your neighbours are the American people in whose collective wisdom much of the world continually trusts. In the long run it's a trust that isn't misplaced.

Good on you for exercising your franchise. And good luck today."

Ang said...

Ditto, Dawn1
Thanks to our Canadian neighbor for thoughtful commentary.
Thanks to all for giving a damn.
Angela