On Voting

Dear Aunt Slugger, 

I am sick and tired of the 2012 presidential election. Both sides are wasting my time. I was thinking about voting for one side, but that's like voting for the lesser of two evils, and I won't stoop to that level. So I am not going to vote AT ALL to show my-


To show your what? Your delightful post-modern individualism? Look, chief, I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume that you fancy yourself something of a scholar on the plight of the nation. You view yourself as a bulwark of reason and logic amidst the frenzied partisan politics that has taken over the nation. So you--the astute intellectual--have risen above it all, pondered the situation, and realized that neither candidate is worthy of your vote.

Congratulations--you have finally realized what the rest of us figured out the first time we voted in a student council election. You have finally caught up.

Anyone who has ever paid attention during an election, or even just listened to fifteen seconds of a candidate speech during a campaign, knows that the candidates are NEVER worth voting for. They are ALWAYS pandering to someone and they are FOREVER blowing smoke up your ass. This is because the type of people who run for federal office are almost always the same people who campaigned for your college's student governing body by promising to overhaul [insert something completely out of their reach: the tenure system for professors, the interstate running behind the campus, the punishment for running a brothel out of a dorm room]. A two hour dinner with your average federal candidate will have you dipping your body into a vat of bleach to try to get the slime off.

That being said, I don't see you out there running for office. And you certainly know that your Aunt Slugger isn't going to run on a platform of telling everyone to go fuck themselves. So I always just get out there and I vote, as odious as the task sometimes is. I, personally, always vote for the "lesser of the two evils" (one of the two candidates who actually has a chance of winning). But if you want to vote for the candidate of one of those weirdo parties that always offers up some wild-eyed screaming lunatic, you should vote for that candidate. Or you should start a write-in campaign to elect your hamster. But you should fucking DO IT and STOP PISSING ABOUT THE CANDIDATES LIKE YOU ARE THE FIRST PERSON TO NOTICE THAT THEY ALL SUCK. Because this is not news. So if you're not going to actually run for office, and you're not going to vote, your apathy is even more repulsive than the candidates themselves - which I didn't think was possible.

Aunt Slugger