And what sort of lives do these people, who pose as being moral, lead themselves? My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite.
–Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
The stakes are very high right now, folks. Couldn’t be higher. You must get out there and vote. Though I have no right to ask nor any sway on your actions, I urge you to VOTE BLUE up and down the ballot. But I suspect that if you still read this blog, you probably at least lean that way anyhow.
This election finds this nation at a very sharp fork in the road that leads to our future. Both will be extremely rough going, one simply from trying to recover from the atrocities committed over the last four years and to somehow recover from a pandemic that has been allowed to run wild by a government without a real plan to battle it.
The other is a path whose course has been set to take us into some form of authoritarian state. Maybe even a fascist police state.
With the hypocritical and illegitimate approval and elevation of a Supreme Court Justice and the dissembling of the Justice Department under an Attorney General who views presidential power as absolute, we are primed to go dangerously wander further from the path of democracy than in any time in our history.
To further illustrate this point, in an underreported move, the president** last week signed an executive order that would sweep away the civil service protections of tens of thousands of government employees who are in their jobs because of their expertise, not their political leanings. These are people who serve the nation, not a party or individual.
They would now be subject to loyalty tests from the administration and could be dismissed for simply telling the truth.
There is an interesting short article in the online magazine Government Executive that outlines the potential ramifications and dangers inherent in this executive order. I urge you to read this article because as is pointed out out in its last paragraph: The executive order’s implications for the government’s ability to perform —and for citizens’ trust in government’s impartiality—could not be greater. This is a very, very big deal.
I couldn’t agree more. This is a very, very big deal.
So, as we come to that fork in the road, please use your vote with thought and care. It has never been more incumbent on you to participate.
We all have to choose.
And it is, as I have pointed out in the past, a binary choice even though there are other parties and candidates on the ballots. To choose to vote for third party candidate this year means that you don’t see that there is a stark difference between the two parties at the top of this ballot and that you don’t care who actually leads us ahead. It is a cynical and childish move, in my opinion.
There is no moral high ground in throwing away your vote with an insignificant protest vote, especially in this year of all the years that have seen us voting as a nation. There are many folks out there who desire to have real third party movements across the nation. I would love to have other options as much as anyone. But this year’s vote might actually determine whether there is even a two party system going ahead, let alone third or fourth parties.
As I wrote above, the GOP is attempting to bend the will of the government to serve its primary movers and not the whole population. They have a shrinking base that is already over represented because of their machinations and if they can, they will use further underhanded tactics to diminish the ability of the opposition party to retaliate in any way. They will use their power to expand the power of the president** and the executive branch. They will further suppress the vote. We will become perhaps a soft police state because though they have the reins of power they do so with the minority of the populace behind them.
Elections could become show elections like we see in autocracies around the world, engineered to provide the desired results.
Third party? Hell, there wouldn’t be much of a second party.
So, the stakes are sky high. Pick a side and let’s have at it.
I ask you to VOTE BLUE.
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I thought since this was St. Patrick’s Day that I would feature an Irish painter. There are a couple of obvious choices– Francis Bacon and Jack Butler Yeats, for example– but I chose Paul Henry, who spent his life painting his native Ireland from 1877 until 1958. He was perhaps the best known painter in Ireland through the first half of the 20th century though many of us here in the States may not recognize the name.
Redtree Times 