I’m posting this vid for two reasons: One, I find it to be hysterically funny and I love the Tina Fey/Amy Poehler team - it just doesn’t get much better than this. The second reason I’m posting is not to influence your vote at the upcoming Presidential election but rather to ask that you NOT be influenced by anything other than what you know to be true.

I’m going to climb up on my soapbox here but too many people cast their vote based solely on how their fathers and mothers voted, how they were raised, what their friends are doing or because someone’s short, tall, fat, thin, white, black, old or young. “My father was a Republican/Democrat, my father’s father was a Republican/Democrat” and on and on.

You know what?

Who cares? Can we just once vote with our hearts and our minds and forget about parties and sides? Can we stop latching onto a candidate because he or she represents the political party we were raised with and instead move past the typical agendas and do what’s right?

Can we as a People, actually speak our voice, not because we’ve gotten sucked into all the political BS that goes on during an election year but because we believe in the person we’re electing to office and that belief is actually based on factual and accurate information?

More importantly, can we believe in a candidate because he or she actually brings something to the table? Not because they’re attractive, rich or funny or because the other candidate isn’t, and not because they remind us of someone we’d like to share a beer with after work.

Our next President has a long, tough road ahead of them. This is not the time to “go along with the crowd” or follow in the footsteps of your family and friends.

Can we open our eyes to the truths before us and at least try to understand what’s really at risk? I can’t count the number of emails that I’ve seen from family and friends, touting the glory of one candidate or another. These emails make jokes, they contain clever cartoons, and they’re all sent with the idea that “obviously”, I couldn’t be voting for anyone else.

But you know what?

I don’t care if hockey moms are like pit bulls nor do I care what a candidate’s preacher might have said. What I do care about is whether or not my President can pull this country out of the shameful place that we’ve gotten to.

What I care about is whether or not he or she will impose their own personal views on mine. Whether they can separate what’s good for them from what’s good for the country. Whether they value my rights and my privacy as much as I do and whether they can effectively protect me without driving the nation into financial ruin.

I care about the kind of education my children will get and the benefits available to my soon-to-retire parents. I care about health care for the sick, assistance for the poor and living in a nation that can evolve and grow without killing my planet.

We have been sucked into an Us vs. Them mentality because we thought we had to take sides and what side you chose depended greatly upon what was socially acceptable in your particular neck of the woods. And that, my lovelies is what many politicians count on. Forget about the issues… we can just dance around that all night. Because if you listen to a political debate among the masses, and I mean really listen, We the People aren’t arguing the issues at all. In fact, a large majority of We The People aren’t even sure what the issues are.

And that’s our fault.

We’ve allowed our government to do exactly what it was designed not to do: our thinking. We’ve stopped making a difference, we’ve stopped protesting and speaking out and raising awareness and we’ve exchanged it for something less exciting but perhaps a little more certain: complacency.

So instead of arguing about who has the better health care plan, we focus on who wears nicer clothes or who can best protect the interests of corporate America. We even argue about who’s the better Christian as if that in itself would be the deciding factor. But what I want to know is who’s the better President.

Not because of race or gender or wealth or social status. Not because they’re Republicans or Democrats or Independents. In fact, I don’t want the status quo. I want something different, something better.

I want change.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 17th, 2008 at 7:54 pm and is filed under Awareness, Exercise Your Mind, Life As We Know It, Random Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.