Just Please Vote

Friday afternoon found me in a huge funk~ you might even call it a state of despair.

I tried sitting in the sun and watching my chickens and dogs and eventually resorted to stuffing Almond Roca in my face. But I still felt dismal in a way I couldn’t quite find the words for.

So, I looked up antonyms to “hopeful” because the opposite of hope was pretty much what I was feeling.

Pessimistic

Sad

Forlorn

Gloomy

A good many of the 270 words I found, courtesy of Power Thesaurus, were really good matches to my mood. But, reading them wasn’t helping improve it at all.

The reason I was feeling so bleak?

Because no one seems to care.

If they do care, it’s not enough to actually do anything about it.

When I was young and learning about atrocities throughout history, I would always wonder how things like that could happen. I mean, how could NO ONE say anything? How could everyone just seem to go along with things that we all look back on in horror?

I never could figure it out, so I just chalked it up to some old fashioned hesitance to question authority or something. But it still bothered and baffled me.

Well, in the last couple of years, I feel like I’m seeing how exactly a society can become that way.

When people who do participate get so caught up in taking sides and attacking their perceived enemy but never stopping to hold their own side accountable, they start letting things slide.

Things that they know are wrong, but they’re too busy being defensive to look in the mirror and tell their people to get their act together and quit acting like idiots.

Watching all the mud slinging leaves a lot of people disenchanted and cynical with the whole thing.

And, maybe because they’re busy trying to figure out their own lives, they don’t have the energy to participate in what feels like a stupid and pointless fight?

I’m guessing, because I’m a voter and I’ve always been a voter.

I may not believe in the whole thing in the way I once did, and I’m certainly disenchanted, but it’s the best and only shot we have to use our voice and have a say in the future of the part of the world we live in.

Politics are ugly, but they affect us all. And really, the reason they’re so ugly is because we’re letting them be.

We’re gobbling up all the divisive and angry rhetoric we can eat.

We’re allowing our leaders to act in ways that most of us would reprimand our children for when we should be holding them accountable~ ESPECIALLY if we voted for them.

A vote or a party affiliation shouldn’t be a free pass for a lifetime of unquestioning loyalty.

People in leadership positions should be representing us in ways we respect, and if they’re not, we should be calling them out, not blindly going along because they’re on our team.

That just leaves us with a couple of awful teams. And how do we explain that to our kids~ especially if we’re NOT DOING ANYTHING ABOUT IT?

I love my kids more than anything, but if they were misbehaving, you know they’d be hearing about it.

And if they tried some lame line about how the other side was behaving, I might agree that it sucked, but I’d still hold them accountable for their own actions.

Why are we letting our leaders act worse than children?


Politicians aren’t our kids, but we still have a responsibility in what we allow them to do. They make rules, but we pay them a lot of money, so we get to hold them accountable. Why aren’t we doing it?

They work for us, so why are we allowing this mass of embarrassingly bad behavior? And why are we trying to defend them by deflecting to what the other side is doing?

We all need to look in the mirror and be willing to tell our own people to do better.

And if we don’t have a side and find the whole thing confusing, we should at least find the things that we do believe in and speak up.

That means voting, because just saying things on the internet doesn’t change laws.

The things you vote for won’t always win, but if you don’t even try, then there’s really no hope. It feels like just handing the future over to a bunch of greedy people who don’t care and act horribly.

We’re all appalled when we hear of places and people who don’t get to use their voices or have any choices, so why on earth wouldn’t we use the one thing we have?

So, the other day, when someone close to me, who I have a lot of respect for, and has a huge heart and big mind seemed like they were NOT going to vote in the upcoming election, I just about lost all hope in humanity altogether.

I felt discouraged and grim.

I don’t think I’m being dramatic when I say that it’s getting uglier and worse all the time.

Good people who actually have a lot in common are acting terribly to one another in the name of political affiliation.

No one is stopping and looking at their neighbor, thinking that these are all real people, most of whom have families and people they love. They’re resorting to thinking in black and white and not as one human to another.

A future like this feels ominous and foreboding at worst, and just plain depressing at best.

I'm going to try to hold out hope that we won't let that happen.


Today is the last day to register to vote in California for the midterm election, so please, please, please use your mind and your heart and your voice and VOTE.
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