I voted Friday in Ohio and although at times in my life I have cast an occasional vote for a local Republican candidate, this time I reverted to my roots and voted like an old fashioned straight ticket Democrat. My Grandfathers would both be proud.
It felt good. No, it felt great as if I were striking a blow for freedom.
After eight years of thoroughly corrupt and incompetent government, the unrelieved horror of several nightmarish wars, the near destruction of American constitutional liberties, the
pillage and plunder of our public treasury by wealth bloated plutocrats and oiligarchs, and the almost total loss of our international reputation I just felt safer somehow checking off the “D’s.”
In about sixty hours it will be over, I will have no fingernails and will need to make another trip to the liquor store, hopefully for a celebration. I cannot let myself think of any other possibility.
People in general as well as friends and family have told me that I take this stuff too personally and maybe I do, but I did a tour in Vietnam as a young Marine and have always felt that it helped to reinforce my basic right to criticize my government when I believed that it was destroying my country.
I am a Democrat by background. I am a political liberal by temperament and inclination. I make both statements proudly, without apology, firm in the knowledge that I share my political beliefs with some of the greatest minds since the enlightenment, including many, if not most, of those who designed the republic over which we still contend.
I also know that the fundamentals of those political beliefs are, and have been, shared by a solid majority of my countrymen both now and throughout the course of our history.
In voting exclusively for the “D’s” the other day I could feel myself aggressively marking the ballot, squeezing the pen and firmly pressing the ink into the paper, as if making sure that there was no doubt, that there was no mistaking my intention to wrest control of my country from the avaricious vermin who have so terribly misused it.
After eight long years of watching the denigration and destruction of much of what is good and decent in this country I have been forced during this general election to listen as those who share my beliefs were called traitors and Un-American by the self serving, cheese headed cheerleaders of corrupt capitalism like Sarah Palin and malignantly angry, calcified, geriatric, grousepots like John McCain.
Enough.
In a few months it may be possible to begin to repair our badly crippled country, to start to bridge many of the divisions among its people, to restore its reputation in the international community, to steer it from its current path of colonial aggression and return it to the rule of law.
I have no illusions as to the perfection of all of the leadership of my own party. My trust and faith are in what I know to be the common decency of the motivations of its grassroots and that, if we win this election, in their newly shared knowledge that through their work and their votes they can once again police their own government.
I believe that we can and will in the coming years bring to this country an improved definition of American greatness, one that includes striving for the prosperity, health, and welfare and a common respect for the dignity and decency of all mankind.
Much depends on the next sixty hours and of course, on your vote.
Please do vote, hold the pen or touch the screen firmly and pay close attention to those “D’s”
Bob Higgins
Worldwide Sawdust