Of NASCAR and Politics

Not long ago, before I was jaded by the system, I believed in the democratic way. Voting was a sacred right that gave each and every person the opportunity to decide who they thought, as a nation, was best to lead them. I now realize that that's bullshit.

I am not a big sports fanatic. I don't have any one favorite football team. I have a favorite NASCAR driver but I am often just as happy to see others win as I am seeing my driver win a race. What I find more often than not when I watch sports is that I'm not so much into who wins as I am into who loses. There are more NASCAR drivers that I want to see finish last than there are who I want to see win. When I watch football, I usually find myself pulling for the team that I don't give a damn about simply because they're playing a team I want to watch lose.

It makes sense when you think about it. There are 43 drivers at the start of any NASCAR race. Only one will win but 42 of them will lose to some degree. You're odds of coming out "victorious" are higher if you're pulling for any one driver NOT to win. It's a bit different with football in that there are only two teams at the beginning so essentially there is a 50/50 chance that your team may win or lose (all things being equal). But there is little chance of your team winning every game throughout the season (last year's Patriots notwithstanding) but having multiple teams you want to lose will give you more opportunity to stay engaged in more games throughout the whole season.

Just as with football and NASCAR, I view my choice in this upcoming election as a choice between who I want to see lose more than the other. I fully believe that for the majority of people who have a stance on (and knowledge of) multiple issues, there will never be any one candidate who has the same view on EVERY issue. In fact, there is a good chance that both candidates will have some stance in common with most multi-issue people. I know that's the case with me and most everyone I know (aside from the one-issue voters, anyway). So, for me, it comes down to an issue of choosing the candidate who I want to lose the election and then voting for the other.

Here's how I see it: This nation is headed down a slope and accelerating. I don't exactly know what's at the bottom of the slope, or what we'll encounter along the way but I know it's not good. The country's economy is crashing and well on its way to another Great Depression. We have a global climate crisis that threatens the entire human species that this nation is doing nothing about. We have a growing disparity between those who possess the most wealth and those who just barely scratch by and the former is growing perpetually more greedy at the expense of the latter who are growing perpetually more desperate. We owe so much money to, and are so dependent on other countries that we're practically owned by them. And some of those countries are becoming increasingly powerful and resource-depleted and will soon need to either find other means of providing for their massive population domestically, or start taking from someone else.

This snowball has been rolling for quite some time now and it's going to be hard to stop...or to even slow it down. But I know that the current administration has done nothing but smooth and pave the path for the snowball, allowing it to accelerate more. I also know that one of the choices in this upcoming election will only continue that acceleration with more of the same policies and biased priorities. That doesn't mean that I believe that the other choice will really implement even a fraction of the changes he promises - I know he won't. Our current government doesn't allow for wholesale changes to the country's energy portfolio or economic system in a single administration...or even two of them. We're a good decade, or two, or even a generation away from realizing real change. But what I do believe is that there is one choice that will at least try to throw some speed bumps onto the slope and maybe, just maybe, start to turn public opinion around to mobilize the nation, as a whole, to start levelling the slope somewhere below where this snowball is heading so that maybe we can turn this around sometime in the future.

The other choice is a guarantee that this snowball will continue to accelerate - A pair of candidates that want more drilling that won't do a damn thing about our economic or climate situation except worsen it; A pair of candidates that want to keep our armed forces over-extended, weakening us even more than we already are (in the name of "national security"), a pair that pays little mind to the precariousness of the climate issue; A pair that doesn't seem to understand what the current economy is doing to the common person.

So my choice seems to be either vote for a pair of candidates that I'm not real thrilled about voting for in an effort to keep the other pair from winning...or not vote at all. I suppose I could waste a vote and vote third-party but thanks to the wonderful two-party system we've developed here in this great (?) nation, I don't know if it wouldn't be better to just not vote at all. Since I'm probably not going to be able to keep from throwing my two cents into any discussion on the actions of the winners over the next four years, I better have had a say in whether or not they got in there in the first place. So I'll be using my sacred right to vote not to elect who I think is best to lead us for the next four years - I don't think either choice fits that description - I'll be voting against who I think is least fit to lead this nation. It's a bit sad that it's come to that but unfortunately that's how it is.

I guess I'll see you at the polls.