. . . Blue, Democrat, surprise-surprise.
It's a two party system.
You pick one or the other.
If you go Third Party people give you a bunch of shit.
Of course, people give you shit for voting in the first place.
Just as they give you shit for not voting.
You're damned if you do/don't in the USofA as I have lived it.
At a certain point I just decided what actually mattered to me, and shut out the rest.
But anyways . . .
The MAGA party has done a lot of damage to my country-the US of A-and they may yet do even more harm.
It's actually easy as hell for me to vote Blue, to vote Democrat even if I am one of these much ballyhooed "independent" voters.
Whatever the failings of the Dems, the Republicans have proven themselves an existential threat to the future of the nation with their illegal wars, ICE death squad, pay-for-play corruption, rolling back of women's rights, scapegoating of transgender people, murderous hostility towards immigrants, embrace of white supremicist ideologies, and, most insidiously, climate change denial.
(Oh, and don't forget about the cover-up of the Epstein Files.)
But it isn't just the politicians who have been distrusted and despised since long before the advent of Trumpism.
It's us.
We the People collectively chose to burn down our own house back in '24, and it could happen again this year-we'll see how it all works out in the coming days and weeks.
So, that's why I voted.
Even if it's just a Band-Aid over a shattering dam.
Seriously, we gotta get our act together in this country.
We gotta get past short term political cycles that play like putrid dystopian reality tv soap operas.
Voting is an essential component of this, but we have to do more.
We have to get beyond our collective greed, consumerism, and callousness.
I don't know how, exactly, we do that-we certainly haven't done it up 'til now.
But we also don't have to do it all right now, we can break it down into smaller steps.
But we've put it off for so long . . . eh, I just don't have much optimism for the Big Picture, y'know?
But that doesn't put me off voting.
And I didn't always feel this way, I used to think voting was pointless, but, frankly, voting has, over the years, become the easy part, at least for me.
Seriously, it's like a perverse upside of our frustrating Two Party System that everyone complains about yet nobody truly wants to change.
I'm grumpy about both the Dems and the MAGA cult . . . but the Dems still have that crucial degree of superiority over the Republicans.
It's not much, but it's enough to get me to the polls.
Plus, you get a free sticker.
Who needs gold when you've got a sticker?
