Winguts

Let me get this off my chest: I want everybody -- everybody! -- to just shut the fuck up about the goddamn election. Seriously. I feel like this presidential campaign has been going on for eleventy thousand years and at this point it's just so much noise and shouting and finger-pointing and I am just so bloody tired of all of it.

This particular cycle has brought out the very worst in all of us, and I feel like the entire country has been reduced to gangs of unruly children trolling the playground, giving noogies and blowing spitballs and pulling hair and throwing rocks. It's ridiculous and foolish and I expect better behavior from my 18-month-old daughter.

Yet we're supposed to be the grown-ups, eh?

I made my choice for President a long time ago. Most of us did. Everybody uses their own set of criteria to make a decision like this, a complicated personal calculus, and that is fine: everybody's got their something. We all have issues and ideas and principles and practices that are important to us, and we cast our votes accordingly.

That's not the problem, though -- it's the disrespect and disregard for the value of everyone else's opinions that are so gross, so squicky, so immature. People yelling at co-workers and friends and family, whispering and judging and casting aspersions, because this one gets a different sum when they do their internal math than that one. Or, That One.

And ... I just don't get it. McCain supporters and Obama supporters did up the sums and figures and at the end of the day they each came up with different numbers. So fucking what? Who gives a holy flying fart? On Election Day, ONE of us is going to be a winner and ONE of us is going to be a loser and for the rest of us everything will be the same as it ever was.

This doesn't mean that I have lost faith in my candidate's message, or that I think both men or both parties or both platforms are the same. Because they're not. Black/white, young/old, liberal/conservative -- choose your own adventure. But when all this nonsense and hullabaloo is over in ten days, is anything really going to be different? Is anyone really going to be different?

Nobody is going to make you change your mind unless you want to. Nobody is going to make you do anything unless you want to. This is America. Nobody has to do any-damn-thing unless they want to. And you know what else? Nobody except you actually gives a damn what you think about anything except you, anyhow.

To quote some random person on the Internet, from earlier today: "What kind of comic book bullshit is this? We are officially all part of the dumbest fucking electorate ever."