Chris Herrington, Contributing Writer
People ask me all the time who I am voting for for President of The United States in the upcoming 2012 elections. It is not that I have some special insight; they’re just curious. Many of my friends are the type who want to know and also want to argue, debate, give the third degree, or remind others of things they may have forgotten if the answers they hear are not the ones they project are the ones they hear, and I actually like to be kept on my toes. So, I will pre-emptively remind them: I don’t support candidates. I don’t do birthdays. I don’t do holidays. I work on the weekends. Every day is just as sacred as every other day in my book. I do, however, make remarks that would seem to favor or disfavor my choices, which I actually do make.
Hardly anyone remembers that George W. Bush added 140,000 square miles of water wilderness in Hawaii during his administration.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papah%C4%81naumoku%C4%81kea_Marine_National_Monument
I bring this up because this is an instance that even his most ardent supporters don’t often remember. I have a habit of doing a strange thing: I like to diagram the State of the Union Addresses. I did every one of W’s, full length, using an augmented style that shows content associations, not unlike, but more intense, than the one used at the University of Iowa. They were cogent, well-written, chalk full of promises, and offering up tremendous insight into the national character and the depth of national pride. So, I tell my liberal friends, don’t undersell any President. Everyone has had something for everybody.
This brings me though to Obama. In some ways he has surprised us all. In other ways, since he acts openly and covertly, he has done some things that have yet to impact us and so his Presidency will outlive him, and we have yet to see the fruits of his labor. But, there is always an overlap from administration to administration, and this is so true that we can hardly blame one President for the total mess or the mayhem we may be suffering through now.
This brings to mind the Occupy movements. If you follow my Facebook work, you may be aware of my Occupy Sanity campaign. There seems to me a place amongst all of the protests and the protests about the protests, which are now fully a year into their display, a need for sanity on all sides.
I look at the national obsessions with specific trigger points, flash points, and discursive tirades, as needing to have a better objective than to lead to a small dark corner and bludgeon each other with epithets. Abortion, gay rights, global warming, racism, illegal immigration, national health, foreign policy, public education, free trade, institutional invasion of privacy, RFDI tagging, Internet taxation, advertising, corruption, blame for the economy, the woeful displays of Congress, lobbyists, the liberal media, shock jocks, reality programming, role models, and a host of other hot topics will not be settled by shuttle cocking the latest installment of blurbs, sound bites, and manipulated video clips on YouTube. We need more thoughtful and considerate conversations about what we want for our nation than to bash each other with one liners and paid experts who will say or do anything to support their corporate or institutional or activist sponsors.
So, when people quote this or that expert to me, when they make this or that moral argument, when they regale over this or that policy, I point to the flag, unfailing, uncompromising, unbesmirched by the tide of whim and fancy, and I ask them all the same question: Who do you trust to own it all? It is absolutely amazing how the buck stops here. We don’t want duplicity, but we do want multiplicity.
This is an inter-disciplinary question. When I get into a conversation, I argue both sides. I lead and follow at the same time. I am impossible to convince and yet if I am on your side, I am your wingman on steroids. I am neither a conservative nor a liberal. I vote for the person, not the party. I vote with the conviction of a man steering a super-tanker. It takes miles and miles to turn the thing around. I know that. I understand that. We are Greece still attempting to understand what freedom means. We are the multiple layers of humanity, struggling with the questions of the cave painters. There are no easy or fixed answers, only hard choices.
Oh, it is way easier to say who you liked as President. Lincoln stands out, but more for the reasons of Walt Whitman. I like Ike, maybe more for his cynicism. I quoted Truman earlier; he is so deeply rooted in the national consciousness that it goes without saying. What then will be memorable about this next President? I remember where I was at certain times depending on what was happening with the President. A cascade of memories floods me now with that thought.
What I want is a memory. A proud, courageous, thoughtful, incisive, comprehensive, savvy, strongly worded, and deeply spiritual memory of what it meant to be alive during the administration of the President of the United States following the 2012 elections. I am not hard to please, but I am damn hard to convince. Come on, Boys, give it your best shot. Girls, better luck next time.
runnigturtle87
“Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule – and both commonly succeed, and are right.”
-H.L. Mencken
I have long claimed that I am an anarchist. This gives me the dubious distinction of being neither a democrat nor a republican, without having to deal with the concept that this necessarily means something else.