Health & Fitness
Blog: Lost Girl and our Modern Political System
SyFy Channel: A Fae who declines the mandatory choice between the Dark and the Light, chooses to remain unaligned and deals with the consequences. Do you feel this way with your political choices?
Over the last few months SyFy Channel has be airing (or re-airing) the Canadian Paranormal/Sci-Fi show Lost Girl. In it a Fae girl who was raised by humans declines the mandatory choice between the Dark and the Light and chooses to remain unaligned. This mandatory choice is often how those of us who don’t 100% or even 51% agree with either the 2 big political parties feel. People tell us we are “wasting our vote” if we don’t choose one or the other. Even when running for City Council, a non-partisan election, I was advised that I should pick one or the other.
Currently, when I vote my ballot has a blend of Democrat, Republican and Other parties selected, based upon research I have done on all the candidates. I don’t vote “along party lines” and I will vote for who I think will do the best job even if my vote will be “wasted”. Recently when talking to my wife about a candidate for President which I liked (who was not running at the time as either a Democrat or Republican) she asked me, “Does he have a chance to win?”, to which I replied, “Not if people keep asking that question before choosing who to vote for.”
If the only people who have a “chance to win” are the Republican or Democrat candidate, then our vote has been disenfranchised. We are stuck in a continual pendulum between what amounts to a duopoly, which considering that both parties and candidates take money from the same billionaires, means we exist in a plutocracy and only the rich can play (and own the system even if they are not the actual candidates).
This is blatantly un-American, to quote George Washington:
"However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterward the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion." ―George Washington
In short I do not feel either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney represent my views of where our country should be going, and there are many other candidates running for President, none of whom will have a “chance” if we always limit ourselves to the “lesser of 2 evils” or the “less bad” of the Democrat and Republican options (which is often how those who are not in complete agreement with one or the other party, view the options for President).
As an FYI, Gary Johnson is running for President as a Libertarian, Jill Stein for the Green Party, Virgil Goode for the Constitution Party, Roseanne Barr for Peace and Freedom, Andre Barnett for Reform Party, and TJ O’Hara has been endorsed by the (Modern) Whig Party and is running as a write in, as well as many others for other parties small and large.
Does this spread the Independent vote thin? Yes. Should we all be a lot more Independent than we are? Absolutely. At some point we need to stop the pendulum, or at least the plutocracy. Is that going to happen this election? Probably not. I don’t think we are ready yet. It’s bad, but not bad enough.
In a final note, the unaligned Lost Girl, was the one who arose to be the champion to defeat an evil which threatened both sides, neither of which could work together to save themselves. What did you expect? It’s TV. Of course it happened that way. How about some life imitating art?
