Voting for Your Pain

An election is occurring tonight.

It’s a primary, one of dozens to come.

It matters not where — or, for the most part, even who.

Elections are public expressions of emotion, as in ‘who do you like?’

Who do you feel like voting for?

Millions of dollars are spent on massive advertising campaigns, built to bend your emotions, play to your fears, or evoke your deepest hatreds.

Few have plans for your hopes’ fewer still have a handle on your dreams.

We have become accustomed to voting for ‘lesser evils’ — forgetting the obvious truth that the lesser evil — is still evil.

So we end up voting for wars we don’t want, policies we don’t support – and people who you really don’t like.

Essentially, we settle – and wonder why things go from bad to worse.

Each candidate promises the moon; and barely delivers dust.

And that is the nature of the beast.

The U.S political system wasn’t designed to represent the People. It was constructed to represent the properties – the well-to-do elites.

A system was built to support the interests of a wealthy minority.

The people, in the words of one of the so-called ‘founders’ (Pennsylvania’s Governor Morris) were seen as a “riotous mob” which filled him with “fear and trembling”. *

You really think that founders like these ever wanted ‘the mob’ to vote? Ever?

That spirit, the fear of ‘the mob’, may be seen today in the increasing efforts to deprive more and more people of the so-called left to vote – not to mention giving them something to vote for!

For over 70 years it allowed primarily Southern states to develop practices that demanded that Blacks pass literacy tests, bean-counting tests and noxious grandfather clauses – which allowed one to vote only if one’s grandfather voted – which, if one’s grandfather was a slave, their grandchildren were barred from voting — forever.

Today, voting itself has become a lesser evil; a process that preserves the power of the propertied, and the economic privileges of the elites.