(no subject)
just got back from the polls -- I've tossed my two cents into the infamous political pot that is Chicago, and I'm starting to scare myself:
-voted Topinka for governor. on the ballot were Topinka, Blagojevich and a Green Party candidate. I wanted to vote for the Green, but Blagojevich is such a dirty, dirty individual I don't want to see him in office, no matter how forward-thinking he is on the environment or the minimum wage. I'm not talking sex-scandal-dirty, I'm talking old-school dirty: millions of dollars in kickbacks to associates from contracts for services for teachers' unions and state health care providers; shady patronage appointments; seriously underhanded personal and political accounting deals. Money dirty. So I held my nose and marked in the republican. She's a social moderate, which is the kind I can deal with; her big thing is licensing gambling so Illinois can pay down some of its debt. Not ideal, but not terrible.
-voted the republican for county board president. I know. but the democrat's old-school dirty, too. And for the past couple weeks I've been watching checks pour in to one of the Bobs for funding the Dem candidate's last-minute campaign push. My bosses, they are not actual democrats -- one, at least, is about as conservative as you can get. they are actual wealthy businesspeople committed to keeping the county board -- which lets them operate they way they want to -- the way it is. I had to vote against.
-voted the democratic incumbent as US rep. Danny Davis, who's big on minority issues and education, and helped put through a big fat complicated Postal Service reform bill last year.
absolved?
sort of.
there were three referendum questions on the ballot:
one to raise the minimum wage. check.
one to withdraw troops from iraq immediately. no thanks. it'd be criminal at this point, like shooting somebody in the foot and telling them to walk home.
and one -- this is where I'm conflicted -- on whether or not to ban the manufacture, sale and distribution of assault weapons.
....i voted no :/. because there's a paranoid libertarian thrashing around inside me that says if my government gets weapons, I get them too.
I don't own a gun. I don't even want one. but I want the option.
(assault weapons, nora. assault weapons.)
(I know :/.)
It's resistance, it's bet-hedging, it's a not-quite-logical paranoia-informed preference. it's fear-induced, it's revolution-influenced, it's an expression of despair and fury against things like the Patriot Act and the stripping of habeus corpus. (how does having a weapon help? I've no idea. come the revolution, I want to have arms at my disposal. something like this.) militamen, here I come.
so this election turned into an interestign self-diagnostic: I am a confused quasi-progressive socialist-libertarian mash-up who's more averse to corrupt and unethical practices than to honest-but-flawed political orientation. and democracy is freaking hard.
-voted Topinka for governor. on the ballot were Topinka, Blagojevich and a Green Party candidate. I wanted to vote for the Green, but Blagojevich is such a dirty, dirty individual I don't want to see him in office, no matter how forward-thinking he is on the environment or the minimum wage. I'm not talking sex-scandal-dirty, I'm talking old-school dirty: millions of dollars in kickbacks to associates from contracts for services for teachers' unions and state health care providers; shady patronage appointments; seriously underhanded personal and political accounting deals. Money dirty. So I held my nose and marked in the republican. She's a social moderate, which is the kind I can deal with; her big thing is licensing gambling so Illinois can pay down some of its debt. Not ideal, but not terrible.
-voted the republican for county board president. I know. but the democrat's old-school dirty, too. And for the past couple weeks I've been watching checks pour in to one of the Bobs for funding the Dem candidate's last-minute campaign push. My bosses, they are not actual democrats -- one, at least, is about as conservative as you can get. they are actual wealthy businesspeople committed to keeping the county board -- which lets them operate they way they want to -- the way it is. I had to vote against.
-voted the democratic incumbent as US rep. Danny Davis, who's big on minority issues and education, and helped put through a big fat complicated Postal Service reform bill last year.
absolved?
sort of.
there were three referendum questions on the ballot:
one to raise the minimum wage. check.
one to withdraw troops from iraq immediately. no thanks. it'd be criminal at this point, like shooting somebody in the foot and telling them to walk home.
and one -- this is where I'm conflicted -- on whether or not to ban the manufacture, sale and distribution of assault weapons.
....i voted no :/. because there's a paranoid libertarian thrashing around inside me that says if my government gets weapons, I get them too.
I don't own a gun. I don't even want one. but I want the option.
(assault weapons, nora. assault weapons.)
(I know :/.)
It's resistance, it's bet-hedging, it's a not-quite-logical paranoia-informed preference. it's fear-induced, it's revolution-influenced, it's an expression of despair and fury against things like the Patriot Act and the stripping of habeus corpus. (how does having a weapon help? I've no idea. come the revolution, I want to have arms at my disposal. something like this.) militamen, here I come.
so this election turned into an interestign self-diagnostic: I am a confused quasi-progressive socialist-libertarian mash-up who's more averse to corrupt and unethical practices than to honest-but-flawed political orientation. and democracy is freaking hard.