Dave Short

It actually came on Tuesday, but it’s been a busy week. Tomorrow, I’ll do my best to get a couple of Missoula vendors to sell copies for me. I might even look into a PayPal arrangement for ordering them online.

It looks great — type is readable, colors are vibrant, and the whole package looks pretty professional. I’m psyched. As I was staring in awe at my one-year-in-the-making baby, I noticed that I come across pretty negative on the record. But that’s NOT the case! I swear. So, here is my not-so-expert opinion.

Where I Stand

I got my George W. Bush ‘LIAR’ shirt in the mail today. I was prepared to engage at least one Bush supporter in a less-than-intelligent conversation about it, but all I got was ‘Cool shirt.’ Silly liberal campus. Anyway, I had a response prepared for what I thought was inevitable: well, my “Kerry LIAR” shirt is in the wash. There is no shirt that I’m aware of. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought that, given the choice, I would wear one. After all, it’s sort of a prerequisite to being a politician (or a human being). Everybody hurts (sorry Michael), and everybody lies.

And that bothers me. The basic stance of Pick Your Poison is that you’re damned if you do, you’re damned if you don’t. Vote for Bush, four more years of stupidity. Kerry doesn’t look any better. But the problem I see goes way beyond the candidates; it’s the parties themselves, and the two-party system, that’s to blame. We’ve becomed trapped in a mindset and it’s a very destructive one: black and white, left and right, one and zero, Kramer and Kramer. Things just aren’t that simple. But the American people have grown up all their lives being told that only two choices are viable, so they have to round off their views and go with the lesser of two evils.

Which is exactly wrong. Why would you vote for a candidate who only supports 60% of your own views? Fear isn’t an answer. To vote Kerry just to keep Bush winning is spiteful, cowardly, and wrong. If you don’t believe in somebody, you don’t vote for them. It’s that simple. It’s time we stopped turning elections into exhibits of fear and started turning them toward the issues.

As I said, our current method of choosing our representatives is outdated. We need a more representative system, one where the winner does not claim everything. The majority is not right all the time. That’s a simple fact. Politics has been stagnating for as long as I can remember. You’d think that with Internet and TV, people would be more informed, but the opposite is true. The Internet is binary by its very nature, ones and zeros, and that binarism filters down, or up, to its information. Every blogger’s either a militant Republican or a smarmy, smart-ass Democrat. Where’s the middle ground? Or the area outside the middle? TV is no better.

We’re heading down a dangerous road. Right now, the two parties in control have made it so that no other parties can possibly be able to challenge them or change things. Thanks to our advances in technology and culture, we’ve accelerated the fall-of-empire syndrome. What took Rome hundreds of years may take us only a few. And that sucks, because America is great, and it still can be. What we need to do is get off our asses and scream, We’ve had enough!. It’s time to stop shouting down others’ views and time to listen, it’s time to make things right. Not the way each of us wants them, but right.

It’s a long road, but it’s possible. Back in 1776, I’m sure that a nation that chooses its leader peacefully was as much a pipe dream as my wish. Anything’s possible, given the power of change.