Date: Wed, 4 Apr 2018 23:57:30 -0400
From: cryptik
Subject: Democrat? Republican? I want neither. Get off your imaginary high horse.
I noticed Virginia Penley’s latest message about the usual Democrat vs. Republican rage and was quite amused by her suggestion to “place our platform down next to yours and discuss whose platform lines up with a majority of Chathamites and Americans and whose is a bit extreme.” Well, Virginia, I’ve got a different perspective for you and your political rivals to chew on.
I don’t care about your “platforms” because neither side actually sticks with what they say they’re going to do. I don’t care for either of your parties because you’re both all about getting elected and then all about doing whatever you feel like doing once you’ve tricked the electorate into voting for you based upon promises you may or may not be able to deliver upon, and may not even try to deliver upon at all.
It absolutely kills people when they try to box me into the Democrat/Clinton or Republican/Trump voting camps and I proclaim that I voted for neither. It simply does not compute because everyone has become used to the cancerous social division of the D/R dichotomy, and therein lies the major problem because with D or R, you’re not deciding WHETHER you get screwed over, you’re only deciding the general manner in which said screwing over is performed. In the end, they’re two sides of the same authoritarian coin and once the votes are tallied up the constituency doesn’t matter anymore. This game plays out the same way from the federal level all the way down to our local elections. It is never any different. Rare indeed is the political candidate whose “platform” is applied after election or whose constituents are fairly represented by said candidate regarding matters that affect them.
As for your sneering about finding “competent, ethical, and honest” candidates, based on the people I’ve met that play the political game it’s not likely for even one of those attributes to exist in a profession that relies on engaging in ambiguous speech with verbal loopholes and non-arguments that leave plenty of wiggle room to change statements well after the fact. No one we’d want in politics is foolish enough to become a politician. Get off of your imaginary high horse.
A smart voter will vote for an individual based on that individual’s characteristics, not a political party. Please kindly take your platform and throw it into Jordan Lake where it belongs. You don’t need it; it’s not like your “party” will follow it anyway.