The Endearing Power of Hate

Every four years I'm amazed that a bunch of bullies who've flunked out of anger management therapy can sweep American voters into their arms and carry them off to polling places. Once deposited at their stations, nearly half of these democratic decision makers choose to bind their futures to a party stewing in averice and hate.

Now the vast majority of these voters don't cherish these socially corrosive values as their own. They are by and large your neighborly working stiff or good-hearted mid-level striver. Their personal values include some smattering of Judeo-Christian charity mixed with the traditional American concepts of individual liberty and personal responsibility. They're not especially simple people having navigated the worlds of child-rearing, frequent career change and mortgageg refinance. Surely in their hearts they appreciate similar effort and struggle in their fellow citizens. Empathy must be present in their consideration of the lives of others.

Despite this recognition of the interconnectedness of the trajectory of their lives and those of citizens who will make another choice in the voting booth, they make the seemingly rational choice to subject themselves and everyone else to another quadrennium of sorrowful descent into festering division, hate and fear.

It's a simple equation to solve. Quick and easy, vote for the draft dodger and deserter to keep you safe in a time of war. Elect the candidate ordained by God to safeguard the separation of church and state. Place in power those who don't even pretend to have anything in common with the people they will subject to the strictures of ever-diminishing opportunity. Buy the lie. Cast the vote. Believe your reward will be waiting with your next paycheck.

If these people stopped to dismantle the lies that overlay the truth perhaps they would make different choices. Not that the viable opposition offers anything more than a tepid imitation of failed policies - they might offer the hope of a slowing rate of decline. But, isn't this actually a better choice? If all we actually have to hope for is the inevitible convergance of an exploding poverty class and a destabilized middle class, the conservative ubber-value of personal greed would demand that we choose the slower course. Grabbing the last bits of what you can, while you can is the best hope of a civilization in moral and economic decline.

Vote for John Kerry, not because he is a better candidate with considered solutions to the depressing effects of global competition. Vote for John Kerry because he'll retain a woman's right to choose, slightly adjust Bush's tax cuts away from his wife's wealth, and put a thin coat of paint of the US presence in the world.