I don’t like to make political statements either.

by Molly Lewis on November 4, 2008, no comments

I originally wrote this up to read as a vlog, but the day ran away from me and so I’m just going to give you what would’ve been the transcript. I know it’s kind of late, as most of the eastern precincts have already closed.

But here goes nothing.

I know better than to discuss party politics in my YouTube videos. Something as innocuous as a montage of me stupidly punning on a candidate’s name was enough to turn people against me in the comments and say very hateful things about my candidate.

As insincerely as I may have presented my answer, you know that I support Obama. Apart from agreeing with about 75% of the things he says and promises, he makes me happy when he talks, he makes me care about America again. You might say that this is a dumb reason to vote for someone and it hinges largely on pathos, but from what a lot of people said in support of McCain in the comments pathos seems to be the biggest thing we listen to when we vote. “He seems like a patriotic all-around good guy.” “He cares about America.” Not to call anyone out — The candidates know it, otherwise they wouldn’t quarrel over who is truly BFFs with a hardworking archetypal everyman like Joe The Plumber.

I’m voting —I voted, yesterday, absentee— for Obama. Really, I would like to see him win. But that’s not what I’m talking to you about. I don’t care who you’re voting for: just vote. We talk up a storm about how our country is so great because we have the right to participate and to elect our leaders, and how we have to push this system onto other countries, and yet we get these dismal voter turnouts year after year after year. Say what you will about how the act of voting is merely symbolic, how we’re seeing a new age of corporate interest and political machines rigging the system and rendering our votes meaningless, and how the media has turned presidential campaigns into a joke and a spectacle.

You have to put that aside and you have to just vote.

The only thing worse than a country bitterly divided between liberals and conservatives, red states and blue states, a country in which everyone talks up their opinions while never listening to the opinions of others, is a country in which nobody stands for anything.

Then again, this is my first election, so what do I know?