If You Love America, DONT VOTE!

It would seem that it has been an election year for the past 2 years, and we aren't even done with the primaries yet! And I don't know about the rest of you, but I am ready for all this idiocy and rhetoric to be over. If any of you are like me, you're starting to wonder if any of it truly matters.

Now, I am not saying that having a voice in your government is unimportant; quite the opposite really. In fact, I am a strong advocate of civic involvement. But what I am calling irrelevant are votes that are decided after political debates, speeches, and other forms of soapbox grandstanding.

How many times have you heard someone make a remark about broken political promises that's followed immediately with, "Politicians are all the same"? The reason that people feel this way is because they watch the debates, and listen to the speeches and think that their favorite candidate will honor the promises he made to get their vote. NEWSFLASH: if you want to know what your candidate holds to be important, or who he is listening to, look at his voting record (or lack thereof). This will give you insight into your candidate's mind (and bank account) better than any speech or debate.

So, if debates and speeches are useless then why do they seem so important? This is a difficult question to answer in a few words, but I will try to be brief.

1. Politicians like attention.

Politicians know that for them to have a chance to win votes, voters have to know their face. And the easiest way to do this is to go on TV and start talking about what people want to hear: crime, freedom, terrorists, money, jobs, family values, etc. Public forum also gives them a chance to embarrass their competition and dupe the public using red herrings and other distractionary tactics. Furthermore, debates and speeches give politicians the ability to instill fear, apathy, anger, or sadness in millions of voters and then permit them to manipulate those emotions to achieve their politican ends.

2. We, as a nation, continue to allow news outlets to tell us what is important and they have decided that its Viewership.

CNN, MSNBC, FOX, and every other news outlet want to have you glued to your sofa with the remote locked on their channel. They do not care about asking penetrating questions, accuracy of statements, or spending time on things that truly matter. Instead, they will ask self-serving things like "Is America ready for a black president?" and "Did Hillary really run from sniper fire?" These are things that do not have any place in an agency concerned with content. What these things do instead is to engage people on an emotional level, not an intellectual one. They will also ask questions to self-appointed "experts" as to which of the currently 3 millionaire senators are the most elitists instead of asking what the social and economic repercussions will be to each candidate's domestic policies.

So if you want your vote to matter then learn about the person you're going to vote for (and about the person you aren't going to vote for). This is a very simple task with websites such as http://votesmart.org/, http://www.aarp.org/, or if you are in the mood for an aptitude test you can look to http://www.dontvote.org/. Any of these will give you a wealth of information and insight into your candidate and allow you to help elect someone that will truly reflect your ideals and values.

Don't forget, an uninformed vote is a vote for unaccountability.