Much though I loathe to admit it, this is a blog, I am a blogger, and, God help me, I’m pretty sure it’s required by law (BLOGGER LAW!) that I talk about the election. Strap in, my lovelies, it’s time to talk politics. We covered religion last time.
Truth be told, I’m pretty sure I’ve had a post like this in mind since last year when I started this damn site. In my head, I’ve always seen myself as a gentle, loving creature, floating around the world wearing flowing robes and softly imparting my patience and wisdom upon all who would hear it. This magnanimous version of Goggle Bob would take the day before the election, and post one simple statement, “I don’t care who you vote for, simply vote.” And thus, my blogger duty fulfilled, I would retire to the atrium to feed orphaned baby bunnies. Perhaps later I would smoke a pipe while reading the New Yorker.
Suffice it to say, this election has changed my plans.
In a way, I feel like it always had to be this way. My first real “remembered” election was Clinton vs. Dole, which, from a child’s perspective (well, technically teenager) was basically “old man vs. young man”. Clinton was freewheeling and loveable, Dole was an old fuddy-duddy. I didn’t understand policy or economics or even really “liberal vs. conservative”, simply that Bill Clinton came off as a 21st Century Man, and Bob Dole repeated his name a lot. … Yes, I’m basically admitting that my political views came entirely from shallow Saturday Night Live sketches. I was an informed little non-voter.
Ah, but the 2000 election, Al Gore vs. George W. Bush, now that’s something I’ll always remember. While I was personally a Gore supporter, I tried to maintain that earlier mentioned benevolent neutrality, so I was something of a political Switzerland to anyone that happened to ask me about my views. And that happened surprisingly often! I remember with perfect clarity a pair of classmates asking who had my vote, and, upon hearing my “I try to stay out of that stuff,” I received a retort of, “You have to care about this election! Don’t you care if a woman can get an abortion!?” To be perfectly honest? I didn’t. I figured I had about as much political sway as a housecat, so what’s the point in worrying about such a thing? Not like it particularly impacted me at the time, anyway. I’m pretty sure that, thanks to public high school sex education, I was going to be wearing six condoms if a woman so much as came within seventeen yards of my jeans. Abortion, war, economics? I understood all these concepts, but they seemed to impact me about as much as my toothpaste choice. Mint or plain? Whatever.
Then the 2000 Election actually happened. I was for Gore, but Bush won in the highly contested final hour. Say what you will about elections being stolen or what have you, but, one way or another, it didn’t instill a lot of trust in our newly elected president. Shortly thereafter, I had a front row seat to 9/11 (I can still close my eyes and see that black cloud that hung over NYC for a week… I’m not speaking metaphorically), and the war that followed. That war… did not make me happy.
Look, on one side of my family, I’m descended from Quakers. On the other side of my family, I had a very vocal grandmother that described World War II and Vietnam and “all our good boys that died” as practically the worst thing that ever happened to our country (twice). I’m basically genetically disinclined toward war, and the idea of a “warmonger” president riles up my conscientious objector blood. It also doesn’t help that I was draft age when this was going on, so, even though I am a tremendous coward, there was that looming threat of maybe getting shipped off into a warzone for no good reason. If only for his promoting “the War on Terror”, I was going to vote for Bush’s opponent in 2004 if the Democrats ran an actual elephant. And, what’s more, I made my opinion known to anyone that would listen. I didn’t seek out conflict, but if someone asked, I’d list the issues. Searching for WMDs? Slamming our National Debt back into the negatives? There was probably a third thing! I don’t care! Get that damn New England born wannabe Texan out of the White House! Jon Stewart agrees with me!
And it didn’t take. We got another four years of Bush.
That election probably colored my political beliefs more than anything before or since. I was convinced that people weren’t that stupid. It had to be a trick. It had to be wealthy kingmakers manipulating our democracy. No, I didn’t believe it was the Illuminati or some vast conspiracy that traced back to lizard people (incidentally, why are people always so afraid of lizard people running our government? I think lizard people might be a fair ruling class), but I did believe that the Republican Machine had grown too powerful, too “good at it” to ever lose an election again. All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing? Evil was greasing the gears and keeping the tank rolling, good was being polite and… neutral. Geez, was my own general detachment from politics hurting my own interests? By this point, I had friends and family members actually serving in this war. Could my own complacency lead to their deaths? My God, the Democrats need to take back the White House.
Which brings us to Obama. Full disclosure: I supported Hilary Clinton in the 2008 primaries. It wasn’t because I agreed with her policies, gender, or that I loved that our presidential line could go Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton (okay, maybe that last thing was a factor); No, I supported Clinton because I felt like she was the only way we could battle the Republican machine. Clinton was mean, she “worked” like a Republican, and she fought and bit Obama every step of the way. Obama was… polite. Obama came off as smart and reserved, two traits I admire, but terrible when fighting a political war. And he was also black, and his name rhymed with “Osama”. To be absolutely clear, I had no problem with these factors (name rhyme rarely impacts my voting), but I figured there was absolutely no way our clearly racist country would ever elect such a man. We had barely (barely!) gotten over the phrase “Muslim terrorist”, how was the nation going to vote for a secret Kenyan?
(Completely unrelated to anything, but anyone remember how there were cries of “secret Muslim” and that Obama’s (Christian) pastor said a mean thing one time? People are weird.)
But, somehow, against all odds, Obama won. It may have had something to do with the economy being in a death spiral, but an actual, honest-to-God democrat was back in the White House for the first time since I was in high school. Those eight years had seemed… very long.
Obama was a wonderful president, from not only a presidential perspective, but also as a human being. Obviously, I’ve never met the man, but he seemed to be consistently thoughtful and obliging. He was not the graduated frat boy we saw helming the Bush administration, nor the playboy that was Slick Willy. Both of those previous presidents seemed to only want the position for the power it bestowed; Obama was president seemingly to make the country 
(and world) a better place. In a way, it feels like Obama was the ideal “philosopher king” of yore: a wise and just ruler that solved problems through diplomacy and empathy. And maybe a few drones. Pobody’s nerfect.
And then we have today.
It’s… hard to be okay with anything that is happening in this election.
First of all, to be clear, I like Clinton. Like, actually like her, not just like her for the presidency. I like her policies, I like that those policies have actually evolved over the course of the campaign, and I still like that she’s a pitbull that is likely to go for the Republican jugular. This is not a woman that, at any point in her career, rolled over and said “hey, you guys do what you want, I’m cool with whatever.” This is a woman that has the potential to get things done as a president.
But she’s following the least politic-y politician in my entire lifetime, so it’s hard to get excited. Personally, I wasn’t a big fan of Bernie Sanders, but I envy his supporters and the fervor they still seem to possess. That man was a truly different candidate, and, love him or hate him, he at least knew how to get his base excited. It didn’t… uh… help. But good hustle!
But on the other side of the aisle. Whoa, boy. I could write an entire article about Trump and what he has exposed about the American people. Racism is over? Nope. Misogyny is a thing of the past? Don’t think so. It’s “just the anonymity of the internet” that makes people assholes? No, my Facebook feed says otherwise. I can see you there, with your name in bold, blue letters, posting a meme about Beyoncé wearing yoga pants being exactly the same as Trump committing sexual assault. Trump has somehow managed to bring out the absolute worst in people, and the really scary thing is that people revel in it.
So, even putting aside literally everything about the Republican platform (like, say, women’s rights, gay rights, immigrant rights, or the whole damn healthcare thing), there was never any way I could vote for Trump in good conscious. When you have a candidate that, again, brings out the absolute worst in the population of the country he’s supposed to lead? No, no you can’t let that kind of thing continue. I know that a Trump loss isn’t going to simply make all these disenfranchised people disappear (they’ll just disappear from the news’ radar), but the idea of people that are so okay with… hate… being empowered by “their” president…. I’ll be honest, it downright scares me. In a way, I’m just as fearful of the future as they are, but for completely different reasons.
So, yes, this is my blog post telling every American reading this post to vote Clinton. I’m with her and all that riot. I’m not excited about her, because I want a metaphorical Obama Jr., but she’s the only real choice in this election. America is already pretty great, vote for the woman that is going to keep it that way.