Voting during a time of chaos

This year has brought its share of chaos into our lives. Every day it seems something new or something old continues to upset the status quo. While the New Year may have begun with new resolutions and hope, it quickly descended into a quagmire of fear, anxiety, and desperation. Everyone has been affected. Some directly by COVID-19, the illness it has brought or the death of a loved one. Others indirectly through the loss of a job, the closing of a business, the need to take care of children no longer allowed to go to school or just by being forced to stay at home. Then, just as there seemed to be a little light at the end of the tunnel, we confronted with rioting, looting, and violence all across the nation. Businesses struggling to make a comeback after being closed for months now find themselves with smashed storefronts, lost merchandise due to looting, and some totally burned out.

While many, especially politicians and the media, would like to attribute all of the rioting, looting, and violence to the circumstances surrounding the death of George Floyd, everything that has happened over the past three decades has led to this outcome. The American people are disgusted and fed up with politicians. Politicians who have been ineffectual for years, who have been self-serving during the time in office, who have picked sides, not because it was right but because it was convenient.

When was the last time politicians, at any level of government, local, state, or federal, enacted legislation helping the American people? oh, they have enacted lots of legislation but it has all been in favor of some demographic, the young or the old, the rich or the poor, the large corporation or the small business, this industry or that, this region of the country or another, this activist group or another. Never do they enact legislation for everyone. The vociferously claim to support every group individually and try to tell us the stand for American beliefs and values. They give speeches and collect thousands of dollars for their words but never do we see those words become legislation for everyone. How can they be all over the board and support everyone?

They talk about inequality. Can they not see they have divided the country into a checkerboard of unequal people? They have divided us into the haves and the have nots, the black, colored, Latino, Asians and whites, the gender this or that, the rich and the poor, the downtrodden and the well to do. They have created inequality and the resulting injustice through the legislation they have enacted. By constantly picking to favor one over another. Why can we not have laws that are equally applicable to all? Would it not be more just? Would it not be easier to see the infractions? To then punish the wrongdoers?

For the American people, it would be much easier. For the politicians, it would be limiting. They would no longer have us divided one against another, throwing our money at competing causes. How would they be able to attract voters willing to support them and their immense egos? How would they be able to control us? They would no longer be able to use fear and panic to tell us what to do and not to do. They would lose access to the hundreds of thousands of dollars they rake in for campaigns. They would lose access to similar amounts for speaking engagements where they spout rhetoric intended to keep us divided.

I for one am tired and disgusted with politicians who use the American people as pawns in their games, all to keep themselves in power and make themselves rich. I am tired of the same old faces in politics for the last four decades. It is time the American people made their voices heard loud and clear. Not through protests and demonstrations but at the ballot box. Please exercise your right to vote and help us make America the country we all dream it should be.