I’m Not Voting This Year — My Thoughts
While sitting in my breakfast nook Sunday morning, I made a decision regarding the upcoming Midterm Elections: I will be voting for no one. I am making a choice to abstain from voting for a simple reason: none of these candidates made me cry and chant “Yes We Can.”
As soon as I came to the decision, the knot in my stomach loosened. I could smile again.
Everything seems pretty bad right now. I read the headlines of these articles on MSN.com and they seem horrible. Sometimes the pictures are bad, too. And I guess it has people pretty tense. I do a short form improv show on Wednesdays (Laughs to Meet Ya!) at my local coffee shop. Sometimes I will use the words I see in the MSN headlines, which used to make people laugh. But when I do it now, I don’t hear as much laughter. It’s probably just a case of consistently bad crowds, but I’m starting to think it could be something more.
And I know that it sounds pretty simple to just vote and a lot of the bad stuff will start to go away, but its not. It’s difficult to explain.
Do you remember when Obama kept saying “Yes We Can” and then got all of us to say “Yes We Can”? I really liked that.
And I guess I’ve just been waiting for a candidate to do something like that. It doesn’t have to be the same thing. I wouldn’t even fit into my old “Yes We Can” shirt. And what I originally thought was crushing guilt that I was not exercising my right that people have been killed in pursuit of, was just this feeling that I wanted to chant something and no one was telling me to chant.
And I’ll say this: it doesn’t make it easier when I have all these people peer pressuring me to vote! I’m…not…you! I am not somebody who lives in a border town currently being occupied by armed militia to ward off a caravan of immigrants escaping brutal poverty and horrible regimes. I’m not transgender. I’m me! And I have different things that I care about!
I want my short-form improv team to do more festivals.
I want to have Movies in the Park but for adults so we can have a night away from the kids.
If you’re gonna smoke, do it outside!
I want to be in a large crowd where we all chant the same damn thing and then we vote for the guy who got us to chant it!
So take me off your calling list. I’m voting no on voting.
