Wednesday, October 20, 2004

Time to dip into politics.

Well, one of the obvious things to do in a blog is vent about politics, especially right now. I was emailing a friend recently about the current election; the conversation started because one of his friends ran into troubles registering to vote in Florida. (FYI, did you know that Jeb Bush is using the same Florida felon list, despite it being inaccurate and illegally preventing thousands of valid residents from voting? Well, it worked last time....) I got myself worked up into a nice little rant just talking about it all, and I thought: let's take some of this bitterness and frustration and throw it up on my blog!

A friend of ours spent the summer doing research in Missouri. She said most of the people she worked with were anti-Bush - but most of THEIR friends were voting for Bush. And the one sole reason they were doing so? Bush's stance on same-sex marriage.

That disturbs me on a number of levels. I fully support gay marriage, so you'd expect that response from me. But here's my main problem - that these Bush supporters see his desire to ban gay marriage as more of an important issue than ANYTHING ELSE THAT'S GOING ON IN THE WORLD right now? That it would be the only thing that affects your vote, regardless of a corrupt government, an out-of-control illegal war, corporate scandals, $4 trillion in debt, the destruction of the environment, the growing hatred or resentment from the rest of the world - ANY of it? I absolutely cannot comprehend this. It's not as if Kerry has agreed to legalize gay marriage, he only has said he won't ban it. And yet this is more of a sticking point for people than the fact that their government is throwing truckloads of money and troops towards a war that is bankrupting the country while benefiting a very small percentage of the population - which happens to be connected to these same government members?

What is the problem here? Is it too complicated for people to understand? It's not like it's a particularily complicated situation, or a conspiracy theory without a leg to stand on. Boiled down to the very basics: Bush and Cheney and/or their friends and relatives stand to profit from a war in the Middle East. It is in their interests to be at war. It is not in your interests. They are robbing your country and feeding it back, indirectly, towards themselves. And yet some of you are not bothered by this. You are bothered much more by the idea that two men or two women in love want to spend their lives together. I do not understand.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home