I tried to write a funny column this week; I tried for a couple days, actually. I failed, but, hey, it's not like I'm ever that funny anyway.
I failed because I was writing about things that might normally interest me -- gambling, for instance, and my housemates' obsession with it, or pardoning Ashlee Simpson for her lip-synching. But the election's on Tuesday, and I honestly felt a little silly talking about anything else.
I hate George W. Bush, his administration and everything they stand for with a deep and abiding passion.
Still, I won't be voting.
Mostly, my family and friends tell me I'm an idiot. They're probably not wrong, or at least, I wish they weren't. People ask me if I realize how bad Bush has been for this country and this world, and of course I do, and they ask me what I will think if I wake up on November 3rd and he is still the president.
But I just don't think that I could wake up on the morning of November 3rd and look myself in the mirror knowing that I had helped to elect John Kerry.
P. Diddy tells me to, "Vote or Die." Christina Aguilera talks about the election affecting my sex life. Even Eminem -- Eminem, for God's sake -- has a music video telling me to vote. Voting is the hottest thing, the hippest new fad, but like any fad, this one, too, will have its expiration date, and I wonder how soon it will come.
I wonder if it will come once we've elected a Democratic ticket that supported wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and voted for the USA PATRIOT act, that refuses to support equal rights for homosexuals and shows no evidence of caring about the state of public education in this country.
I wonder if anyone will care that they will have voted for a Senator and a party who refused to stand up for the rights of disenfranchised black Floridians.
I wonder if anyone will notice, after November 3rd, that we still have an electoral system that makes most of our votes meaningless, based on a system designed to reward Southern states for the slaves they once only considered 3/5ths of a person, and that this year, thanks to a campaign finance system few of us can afford to participate in, we have a choice between two distant cousins of the same race, religion and socioeconomic background who went to the same college and were in the same secret society, or third party candidates who might as well not be running.
I wonder whether we'll ever realize that the right to choose the lesser of two evils is no right at all.
Sincereky,
Alex Koppelman
