Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Election rant

I came home from voting to discover that the dog had peed on the couch. As I mentioned elsewhere, I suspect that she was voting that I stay home more. After all, my job description is stay-at-home mom. Then again, why should I be any more faithful to my job than our elected officials have been to their jobs for the past 18 (or more) months? I mean, we elected them to do their jobs, not to campaign, but I see very little evidence of them having done much beyond campaigning these past long, very long, months. And I have to wonder if we are the only country who cheerfully and enthusiastically (well, these adverbs don't describe me, practically ever, but you get the point) go to the polls to elect or re-elect folks who have shamefully neglected the jobs they have been paid for and not done almost as frequently, and in some cases more frequently, than they have performed their jobs. Yes, I am bitter but I'm not really a nut job. I just wonder what other job in the world allows and often rewards this sort of neglect. I'd say I'd like a job like that but really, I have more integrity than that and I highly suspect that's one of the largest problems in American politics these days.

On a lighter note, I not only waited in line for an hour to cast a vote for the slightly lesser evil of two job-slacking choices but I managed to have to deal with a woman who was so old she'd forgotten alphabetical order since she spent an obscene amount of time looking for my registration on a page on which my name couldn't possibly be listed unless it was transliterated into Cyrillic or some other alphabet not currently in use here in the good ole US of A. Once she did indeed locate me (and the fact that *zero* bits of identification are required to vote in NC is more than a little scary) and I moved into yet another line--good thing I took War and Peace with me to read while killing time--I got to be the one who caused the discovery of the sad demise of one of the voting machines. I did eventually get moved to a working machine, voted, and headed home. So I think the only thing I really accomplished today was reading several chapters further in W&P. Sad when elections consistently only leave a cynical and bitter taste in your mouth.

1 comment:

  1. How are you liking W&P? I found the start pleasant but not enthralling, and then got hooked somewhere in the giant middle. Of course, I was much younger than. I haven't been able to get into Anna Karena at all.

    I lucked out voting. Once I convinced the sorter guy that my name really was MITCHAM not mitchell I went straight to a station (no machines for primitive us, I bubbled in a piece of paper). And, to make thing sweeter, on my way out I saw that a line had formed reaching around the corridor while I had walked right in. SCORE. (Hmm, does that kind of shadenfreude make me a bad voter?)

    ReplyDelete

I have had to disable the anonymous comment option to cut down on the spam and I apologize to those of you for whom this makes commenting a chore. I hope you'll still opt to leave me your thoughts. I love to hear what you think, especially so I know I'm not just whistling into the wind here at my computer.

Popular Posts