by Jerry Murley
We have seen hope, change, sharing, cooperation, and honesty mocked daily.
We have seen standards of fact and truth knowingly and shamelessly flouted and forgotten.
We have seen science ignored, ridiculed, weakened, and abandoned.
We have seen an attempt to buy an election with the money of hidden millionaires and corporations.
We have seen non-whites, non-Christians, and non-heterosexuals vilified, blamed, and excluded.
We have seen efforts to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of legitimate voters with state schemes that intimidate and concoct Jim-Crow-like hurdles to discourage voting.
We have seen absolute selfishness, venom, and vitriol portrayed as virtuous.
We have seen assertions that bald might and force of will obviate patience, negotiation, and compromise.
We have seen preemptive war characterized as the sole path to peace.
We have seen our world made to appear nonsensical or diabolical out of pure political calculation devoid of historical and ethical merit.
We have seen the poor, the infirm, the untrained, the underemployed, and the retired castigated as freeloaders.
We have seen tax dodgers praised as deserving to retain tax-break advantages that will worsen the deficit and abet the continued evasion of proportional responsibility by the wealthy and well connected.
We have seen regulation assailed while financiers filched, banks foreclosed, bodies fattened, ice shelves melted, homes flooded, fields dried, and forests burned.
We have seen laws and policies advocated by one group as good, effective, pragmatic solutions scorned and rejected once they are accepted and forwarded by political opponents.
We have seen progress in the security and welfare of the nation stymied for two full years by petty parliamentary procedures for the sole purpose of defeating one man in one election.
We have seen back-room notions, ad-agency slogans, and smart-ass phrases pour unchecked by reason from the lips of potentially rational and decent people.
We now know who the "elite" are – the people who excessively tap the wealth of the nation. Bundles of money, erected like barricades to reality and logic, cannot disguise the fact that heavily conservative states draw more than they contribute to federal funds or that crooks under cover of incorporation suck our economy dry.
Many elections have meant much. When process and prospects are considered, this one equals, if not surpasses, the others. This election is not about health care or the budget: it is about the future of democracy and our mutual investment in prosperity. Citizens yet straddling the fence are not alive to the facts, the issues, the consequences – the import – of the day. A decision is due. The evidence is plentiful. There is but one way forward and no way back.
