Yesterday I did something I've never done before. I consciously neglected to vote. For someone who spent his entire adult life in politics and government that's a jarring departure. It does leave me with a hollow feeling. Yet I can't feel badly about my choice to run an important errand rather than cast a vote for candidates of my own party who reflect no greater cause than their own careers and who's policies will do nothing to address the pressing issues of the day. As a conservative Republican I can no longer inconvenience myself to pull the lever for a party that never reduces the size of government as it says it should and refuses to take action against the sea of illegal aliens that have invaded my community. A party that won't defend the interests of it's own citizen members and treats it's own platform as a joke no longer deserves my vote.
I'm familiar with all the arguments against not voting and have used them myself. Back when we had a cold war to win they made a lot of sense. Today we have different challenges and the face of the opponent is just as likely to be within the Republican party as without. The American people have elected Republicans posing as conservatives for a generation now and I and I, and they, have reached a point of departure.
The point of voting is to create a covenant between the candidate and the electorate around clearly enunciated policies. I see no such covenant in the making at this point. If the Republican party will not defend our borders, our language and way of life, substantially reduce the burden of government on the citizens, and end the sinister folly in Iraq, then it serves no useful purpose. A generation of conservatives did not support the party only to see that party supplant our population with third world laborers, hollow out our industrial might, and fight wars on behalf of a foreign power. I cannot support a party that has become the plaything of the neoconservatives and the business round table. The purpose of winning the cold war was not to build the stock portfolios of a rootless elite at the expense of the native population of the republic.
As far as the local candidates are concerned I suffer from the disability of actually knowing some of them. They are fairly decent lot, with a few glad-handing sociopaths thrown in. I might have voted for some of them had I not been out looking for a car to replace the one that can no longer pass the states idiotic inspection regime.
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ME
- Thomas O. Meehan
- I am retired from government, law enforcement, politics and all other pointless endeavors. I eat when I am hungry and sleep when I am tired.
Welcome to the web, Odysseus on the Rocks where no obnoxious Editorial Page editor can clip your thoughts, and trim your syntax down to some palpably porous pudding that even you don't recognize.
ReplyDeleteAs for the voting thing, my dear mum once said to me when I professed my earnest intention of throwing away my first shot at the Presidential franchise on a write-in vote for Eugene McCarthy, "Well, that's nice. Of course . . . someone is going to win."
That little exchange took place the afternoon before election day, which left me all night to think about it.
She really knew how to get to me without actually lecturing.
So, the next morning I voted for one of the two possible choices (the wrong one, as it turned out), but I chose.
And a few years later I came to my senses and realized that the issues were what I considered important, not what some smarty-pants newspaper writer said the issues were.
We should all remember the code of the Hawk . . . some things worth having, are often quite well hidden.