Meditation for July 31st, 2016
How To 3rd Party
A lot of you are upset that you will be picking between the lesser of two evils this November (God! We don’t vote till November! We have to endure this for another three months!?!). Some of you will be ‘voting your conscience’ and choosing to vote for a 3rd party candidate like Libertarian Party, Gary Johnson or Green Party, Jill Stein. Some of you feel too burned to vote at all.
It would be nice to make people know that right now voting for a third party candidate would be a great idea, but putting the Trump in the White House is too scary of a prospect, especially with one to three Supreme Court Justices up in the next four years.
I get it. You want to vote for someone you like. You don’t like Hillary. You think she is a cruel lying status quo politician. You see all the scandal surrounding her. She was using her AOL email to send state secrets (it wasn’t AOL, but it’s funnier to say). The DNC fucked Bernie to make sure she became the front runner. You don’t like her. She is not a likable person, but right now she is the best choice in the system we have.
We don’t have another system. We don’t have you quaint coffee shop dream system where people that are pure and ideal are running for office and can get voted on. We don’t have a system where you don’t need a billion dollars to run for office. We have a stupid system run by two parties that don’t differ all that much anymore. Unless you’re a hardcore party member you can’t tell the difference between the Republican Coke and the Democrat Pepsi. (I chose Pepsi for the Democrats because they are a tad sweeter)
Lets look at how this election is a lot like baseball. There is no salary cap in baseball, so a team can spend as much money it wants to win. Right now the Los Angeles Dodgers have spent the most money this year by spending just slightly more than 227 million dollars. Most of their payroll is free agents who asked for a lot of money because of their talent. Last years World Series winners are the Kansas City Royals, and they spent 112 million.
The Dodgers did make it to the playoffs last year, but did not get their monies worth. What is the 100+ million difference? The Kansas City Royals raised their own players while the Dodgers bought theirs.
What does this have to do with politics and 3rd parties having a chance?
Stop voting like a Dodger fan. Stop just coming out to vote on the presidential election cycle. This is not where you change a thing. This is where the buck stops. Be like the Kansas City Royal fans and endure years of rebuilding and finally have it all pay off.
This means get into local elections. This means caring about midterm elections. Vote 3rd party for local and regional elections. Volunteer. You start at the bottom and change the culture there before you change the culture elsewhere. If we have more mayors, state legislature and commissioners that are from 3rd parties then we have more people from 3rd parties that have political experience. They then can run for higher offices and have a resume.
Will this change anything overnight?
No. But you haven’t even tried to do this before. There was a small try at this in the 60s, but those people got older and became our parents who then forgot what the fuck they were fighting for and they are the ones that are scared we won’t vote for Hillary.
This will take time. This will take educating those that come of age every few years. This will mean keeping the fight going for the duration. We can’t change the present, but we can change the future. It takes time and the slow game.
People will talk about how Lincoln was a third party candidate. He was at the right time at the right place. The Whig party was imploding because of its indecision on slavery. The Republicans left an already failing party and started their own to fight slavery. The Whigs wanted a stronger congress and a weaker executive branch while the Democrats wanted the opposite.
Now look where we are. We get distracted by presidential elections like they’re the only thing that matters. You want a system that works, you have to make it. You. Not the people in the system. They can’t be trusted because they are in the system that you don’t want. They are getting paid already. Why would they remove their paycheck? You have to make the system you want and that means voting locally. That means voting all the time and that means helping other people voting.
Now stop being a suicide bomber and put the bomb vest down and help Hillary to win. You might not get fucked by a Trump presidency, but a lot of our brothers, sisters, mothers and fathers will.