Life Between 0 and 1

It’s only September of 2015, over a year away from the Presidential election in November 2016, and we’re already seeing way too much coverage on the next election daily on the news.  I personally think it is stupid to have this much coverage so early in the race for the White House.  I mean, here’s an interesting statistic that I don’t think most Americans have bothered to digest:

• Approximately 300 million Americans in the United States in 2008
• Approximately 150 million bothered to vote in that election
• 51%, of those 150 million, voted for our current President
• Do the math.  Approximately 25% of the countries population actually chose our current President

I don’t get it.  There are literally millions of people who complain on Facebook, blogs, forums, news sites, etc. about our current President.  Only approximately a quarter of the country actually chose him.  I won’t indicate who I voted for as it is irrelevant to this conversation.  What I will say though, is that there needs to be an awakening within the American public that voting is not an inconvenience.  It’s one of the many rights that this country was founded upon regardless of its misguided beginnings.  The truth is now its fair for everyone:  1 person = 1 vote.

It’s crap like the picture above that underscores how laughable American politics have become.  It’s a subject no one wants to bring up in a group of friends.  It’s one of two subjects that polarize people to the point of wanting to throw punches at one another.  Personally, I avoid both politics (1) and religion (2) in most conversations with even like minded people.  I don’t like to get into debates where a differing opinion can alter the course of a friendship.  I reserve my right to not engage as my opinion is exactly that, mine, and no one can sway me without a titanic amount of fact.  I choose not to engage as I just don’t have the energy.

That isn’t to say that I don’t do my own research, online, on my own time and in the privacy of my own head.  I make my decisions based on anything that can be backed up by hard data so I can form my own opinion.  I personally am a Bernie Sanders fan, however there are almost 20 candidates for both Republican and Democrat and over a years worth of data can alter my opinion, or not.  Depends on the facts.  With all of this going on, no one ever will know the true story or all the facts.  It is after all the government we’re talking about here and there are things they think is necessary to keep away from the public.  I get it, national security and all that, but shouldn’t we decide what is and isn’t appropriate for us to consume as individuals?

The real crime though, and I firmly believe in this, is the wealthy “forcing” their agendas on the majority behind the cloaked veil of “lobbyists.”  A true shame of how the system has been warped so much and under such cloak and dagger tactics.  Monsanto, Koch Brothers, the 1%, the list goes on and on.  I’m of the belief that if every American able to vote actually took just 10 minutes per day actually researching some of the crap going on, there would be a fundamental shift in how politics are played in the general arena.

I saw a commercial just this weekend about the Koch brothers.  Here’s the link to the commercial if you’re interested in puking a little in your throat.  As written on the Business Insider website where I got the link to the video:

Now, the Kochs want to burnish the image of the corporation that created their fortune. The 60-second ad does not show or mention the brothers. Instead, it shows images of hardworking Koch employees and everyday people interacting with products made by Koch industries, from toilet paper to jeans. There’s a strong-use of generic Americana imagery, such as cowboys, welders, and blue-collar workers in hard hats. They all seem to love their jobs. (The Kochs have opposed union rights for such workers.)

The Koch brothers have given so much money to campaigns in the past its hard to separate what they’ve endorsed and what they’ve blocked.  Navigating the lobby waters would drive a sane person insane.  What I don’t get is why we’ve allowed a system to flourish where the super wealthy can get away with everything they do just so they can make more money.  I don’t recall the exact statistic, but it was calculated that Bill Gates was worth almost 90 billion at one point in the past.  If he gave all that money to Jesus Christ, and Jesus spent 1 million per day from birth to present, he wouldn’t be able to spend it all.  That kind of wealth is sickening.

I don’t support pure socialism, please don’t misunderstand me on this.  I believe in more of a socialist/capitalist type of system where everyone pays their fair share based on their income and wealth.  It would take queues from other countries that support National Healthcare, taxes and levies on finite resources (oil, gas, etc.), tax breaks on renewable resources (solar, wind, recyclables, etc.) and an economic structure that supports a moderate share of wealth.  The United States is no where near that sort of structure and in fact laws are catered to the companies that are contributing to the corruption.

We need a reboot of our government, plain and simple.