Your Thoughts Exactly

Many people today are sad or talking about leaving the country. I on the other hand, am just plain angry in so many ways, at so many groups of people. Thus this post will be venting at these various people.

I am mad at myself. I should have done more to convince overseas American university students to get their vote in. I was planning on posting flyers around campus letting people know where they could register for absentee ballots. I didn’t because I am a lazy bastard. It would have taken me one rainy afternoon of which there have been countless this year. In the next election cycle, I must do better.

I am mad at my generation. The youth vote is age 18-29 and while we voted in greater numbers, this was only motivated by a greater political interest across the board rather than a specific youth vote movement. Gabe told me about a hip-hop event he hosted at The Mansion where several “Fuck Bush,” chants broke out. I wonder how many of those kids actually made it to the polling booths. I can hear all the arguments against voting, and understand their rational merits. Let’s be honest though, the reason much of our generation doesn’t vote is that they couldn’t be bothered to get up off their ass and go to the polling booths. They just don’t care. At some point, we have to take responsibility for our lives and our government, and pay attention to what’s going on. If you didn’t vote this time, and it was simply because you were to lazy too go to the polling place, or spend 30 seconds looking online to find out how to register in your state, you have gotten exactly what you deserve. Please, please, spend 5 minutes a day reading news headlines from now until the next election. 5 minutes, that’s all I ask. When the time comes to register in 2006, do it. No excuses.

I am mad at the Democratic Party. I am glad Daschle lost because it opens the door for new leadership, not that I expect anyone else to do better. What the Democrats need is two-fold. First, a commitment to the principles that attract people to the Democratic Party in the first place: watching out for the little guy, protecting freedom through civil liberties, economic sense and peacemaking, the legacies of FDR, JFK, and Clinton. A great place to start would be a Party wide commitment to blocking any Gay Marriage Amendment. Don’t be afraid to call this legislation what it is: legalized bigotry. Secondly, the Democratic Party needs leadership and unity. They should never have had 9 candidates running in the primaries, sniping at each other and shooting each other down for months on end. That’s how you end up with an unattractive candidate like Kerry. Rather, the liberal base (not to be confused with the leftist side of the party,) should have been scouting candidates in 2002 and thrown their support behind a candidate with broad appeal by late 2003, similar to what the Republicans did with Bush in 2000. Even if this had been Dean, I think the Democratic candidate would have been in a stronger position coming out of the primaries. Instead, Kerry had to worry about preliminary sniping from the Bush camp (being labeled a flip-flopper for the first time,) while fending off Democratic rivals late into May, who then picked up on the same anti-Kerry rhetoric. Democratic lawmakers need to know their roles and shut their mouths…except for when their role calls for them to be liberal muckrakers. For example, I want my Congressmen, Michael Capuano, who ran unopposed, to spend the next two years making as many inflammatory liberal statements as possible. He won’t lose his seat in Boston, and he doesn’t need to worry about his future in politics—he doesn’t have one.

I am mad at those stupid states in the middle of the country. I feel the need to drop what I am doing at school and go live in rural Oklahoma for a year to better understand how out of touch I am from half the population. The way I see it, there is a whole segment of Southern and Midwestern America focused on “moral issues,” which leads to the election of white males such as Jim DeMint from South Carolina, who wants to make all abortions illegal, and doesn't think homosexuals or single mothers should be allowed to vote in public schools. These people vote their religion, a fact that is almost impossible to reverse. To do so requires changing the leadership and rhetoric of institutions like the Christian Coalition and Southern Baptist Church, which I can’t see happening anytime soon. These people vote scared: they fear things different than themselves; they see America as literally “going to hell.” Then there is a whole segment of America focused on the War of Terror. These people also vote scared, only their source of fear isn’t the Bible, but rather the Bush Administration, raising terror alerts, warning that “there will be attacks again, especially if a Democrat is elected,” putting terrorist hotlines on road signs. This I can do something about. I can inform people what an utter load of crap the supposed threat of terrorism is, and use my knowledge of International Relations to show that we are wasting our time and money in Iraq. Whether anyone listens, I can’t say.

In the next four years, I hope the following things don’t occur: A draft, illegalizing abortions, a gay marriage amendment, or another major misguided military conflict. The Democrats still hold enough political weight to stop most of these things, especially if they could ever get their act together enough to take back part of Congress by 2006. To those people considering leaving the country, don’t. Now is when America needs us the most. Take this as a challenge, and don’t back down like we have been trained to do, rather step up. We need to be heard for once.