I feel as if something needs to be said here. Something grandiose relating to our impending elections. Something about how we should all vote for Kerry. I really wish I didn’t have to vote for him though.
There’s the debate, spurred on mostly by the third party candidates, concerning voting with your conscience. They seem to think that for the majority of the progressive minded folk, voting for someone other than the two candidates would be voting with your conscience. Obviously, neither of them really embody the values and ideals of what I think should be going on in the political sphere. So I should vote for Nader, or Badnariak, or someone else. That is what my ideals tell me, right? My conscience steers me not towards an ever closing gap of difference between Blue and Red, but towards a new guiding color. We need a change, and the only wake up call is to vote for the best candidate, based on the issues. Now is the winter of our discontent, and the jaded youth need to talk back to the politicians!
Rallying cries like this warm my heart, and chill it in the next breath. Any other time, my conscience would have me casting the vote for some third party candidate, because all of what I just said is true. The differences between Elephant and Donkey are shrinking, and no one is talking about the next level of equality and progression in America. At least no one within the two major parties. But my conscience tells me something different this time. My conscience tells me to defeat Bush. Not just to not vote for him, not just vote against him, but vote in a way that helps him to not get elected. See, what Bush represents is so much worse than what we have even now, we all need to act to preserve the possibility of change in the future. This election is not a referendum on gay marriage, on Iraq, on oil policy, on the economy, or on education. It’s a referendum on the future course of our nation. Is it to be dominated by a fear mongering, status-quo keeping, isolationist yet imperialist, school of thought born not out of a moralistic rationality, but out of a fundamentalist outdated form of christianity unknown before the 20th century? I think not. I think that we all owe it to ourselves to keep this from happening.
This isn’t to say that we put aside our desires for progression, as some would say you do with a vote for John Kerry. In fact, this is putting our progression first. In order to fight for the progression of society, sometimes you have to take a stand against regression. That’s what this is all about this time around, fighting against regression. In order to secure the possibility of moving forward, we need to first make sure that we don’t move too far back. So vote with your conscience, vote Bush out of office, and vote. Phil Knight said it best: Just Do It.
justinª