Time to Vote Again...

The following is a direct response to what was written here...

http://www.nicolavincent-abnett.com/2015/10/dreaming-spires-and-democratic-process.html

I'm a big fan of Nik Vincent's writing and recently on her blog, she wrote about an election at Oxford University.
Now usually I have some contemplations after reading stuff she's written but with this one, I don't know, mabes it's just too far out there for me.
I never attended a college, something I look back on as one of the bigger mistakes of my life but at the time, I can remember having a girlfriend and she was a redhead right...
I'm also not all that familiar with Oxford as I'm an American and not very "in touch" with stuff that occurs across the salty pond eh.

So I told myself nope, there's nothin' I could follow that up with you know.
Then I kicked it around the dark corners of my noodle for a bit and "tried" right.
I thought, mabes I could get into the horrific cost of college educations and how they don't seem to help someone actually acquire a job anymore.  Or about how if you do get a decent degree, that you would have to take that knowledge to a foreign country if you didn't want to be an English major holding down a dishwashing career right.
Or praps I could illustrate the difference between a private institution's methods versus a public's.  Possibs I could throw some poo on the whole racism topic again I mean, that's a big bullseye right.

But in the end I thought you know, what I really want to "attack" is the way we "vote" and the why behind the whole thing because it occurs to me, that our current system, for any style "voting", well it's tainted, all the way to it's clunky center.

But first, some background, ah, dwell in it, rotate around in it, it's warm and bubbly...
My country has a long and detailed history about the voting process.  Women have fought for the right, the privilege.  African Americans have fought for the same.
We thought we perfected the system at some point and the "big deal" slowly faded mabes.
Our soldiers are taught that they fight for our right to vote and that anybody that doesn't cast their feelings, is insulting the men and women who put their lives on the line for us and our privileges.
But I have a younger brother who is a Marine, he served in Iraq and I don't vote and never have.
Why do I carelessly take my privilege, the one that not many other people have and the one that seems like it must be fought for, why do I crinkle that thing up and throw it in the rubbish bin at every opportunity..?

Because to me, the system is broken.
To me, just like Nik described, the whole mess feels unfair to some degree.  But not when it comes to "who" gets to vote because of their skin color or the college they attended.
To me, it feels broken because there is no criteria to exclude some people from voting.  If you're an American citizen, you get to vote, plain and simple.
It doesn't matter if you've been a citizen for one year or twenty.  It doesn't matter if you speak the same language, if you live nearby or if you don't know a thing about the whole process.
To us, it seems like you get to pick "A" or "B" and honestly, how hard is that..?
Could my two year old neighbor's child make that choice?  Could my dog sniff one bowl of food first?

Indeed it seems that anyone with eyelashes can blink once for this or twice for that right.
Is that all it takes and really, should our system be that "empty", that it's no more complicated than a coin flip?

Where I live, when it gets close to election times, our media is flooded with "campaign" propaganda.  They're all over our tele, they're on the radio stations, they fill our mailbox with trash and they even call on our phones to repeat their previously recorded messages.
It gets so awful that we scream for them to stop, that we don't care and we just want the stupid thing to be over so they can end their ridiculous bombardment to our sanity.
But while I'm screaming and begging, my mind wanders into other places.  Like the cost of such a media onslaught.  Like dollar signs floating away...

I wonder for a moment, how much money these people spend trying to convince the general uncaring public to vote for them.  Is it a million?  A billion?  I know it must be "lots" right.
And what if, crazy thought time, what if they stopped?  What if there was a better way to spend all that money..?
Could it be put towards homeless shelters?  Better teachers and educations for our kids at the pre-college levels?  Better roads and bridges which offers, jobs?
Better "anything" than another ignored tele commercial?
Now I know the media channels need their advertising money, that right there is a whole 'nother topic worthy of a seventy page blog write up.
And I know the printing people need work making flyers, the mail people need work delivering all that junk mail, even the phone people need autodialers to spam a recorded message (wait, do they..?)

But come on, I'm supposed to "support" a guy (or girl) that regularly spends a butt load of money just trying to "win" his job?
Like I'm poor and have no job but if I had a wagon full of money, I could "buy" my position and I'd get more money than I spent, back..?

What if there was a stipulation to being able to vote and what if it didn't concern your outside appearance or the space between your legs.
What if, brace yourself, what if it depended on how intelligent and knowledgeable about the candidates you were..?
What if there was an unbiased fashion, that we could all learn about the candidates in a way that didn't cost money?  Like no money.
Instead of bazillions, the price tag was zero.  Big fat none.
Because I write and I want people to read my thoughts eh.  I publish my thoughts to a blog site and it's free to me.  Why can't it be free to them as well?
Shouldn't they be restricted anyway, to just words on a screen?  No more commercialism with fancy video editing and paid actors.  No more robo calls, no more junk mail that I need to recycle.
Just a politician's own words, on their own blog site, free of charge, that I can read and study.

But, let's take it a step further.  Instead of being lied to, about a politician by that politician's own voice, what if there were someone else, someone we could trust, that would type up a little review or evaluation on said blog site.
What if they could compile a person's previous experience, what if the "tally" of how they voted was presented.  Then we could all see quite clearly, what this person voted for in their previous roles.
What if there was even a tracker that reported how many times that politician was absent on their votes?
Or a statement about this person's spending habits, about how they used tax dollars to fly their families out to Vegas, what if we posted their own tax records, their coworkers thoughts and feelings...

What if we made these people transparent so that "everything" about them was public knowledge?  How far would their dollars take them then..?

Because if there were a candidate, who didn't spend a single dollar on his campaign fund, if they presented themselves in blog site form free of advertisers...
Mabes I'd vote for them huh.

We desperately need a new way to become informed about who we're voting for.  There should be a class or a video explaining the whole voting process and if you don't pass the test at the end, you don't get to throw your garbage vote in the box.
There should be no more money spent "campaigning".  Every candidate should be on the same level playing surface regardless of pocket book size.
But I really don't care who wins, I don't care about who runs.  I don't care about you and if you vote or stay at home and sit on your couch complaining.
I care about the people in our military because when they tell them they're fighting for our rights, well mabes someone should tell them to stop fighting because our rights don't grant us much in this broken system.