VOTE Dammit!

I know that my own audience who can actually act upon this is small. The majority of people who read what I post do not have votes in the US election. But I suppose I know a lot of people who know people who can vote in the US election, so... I'll make this one final plea.

Barring any huge changes in the state of things, this is going to be the last thing of any substance I'm going to post beyond some possible snark and observation on Election Day. It's NaNoWroMo and I am 6000+ words in and don't have time to be writing this - except I couldn't live with myself if I didn't say it all one last time in as clear terms as I could muster.

I'm also aware that the majority of people I can reach with this already agree with me, so for the most part I'm shouting into the echo-chamber - but if there is any chance that my words influence anyone, I want to have put my words out there.

1) VOTE!  If you can vote on Tuesday, VOTE ON TUESDAY (or before, if you haven't already). Not voting is totally fucking childish. You have a vote. You have a stake in the result. Cynical "my vote doesn't count" is complete bullshit. I live in an area that ALWAYS votes the same way. ALWAYS. My vote counts. Because things change, and one day this area will vote a different way, and my vote now can support that change by showing it is possible - or it can reinforce the status quo if things are as contentious as they were in the last Canadian election (pretty much exactly a year ago) and safeguard against an unwanted result. So vote. Children below the age of majority don't have a vote. Don't be childish. Fucking vote. You don't get to live in a world where this goes the wrong way (however you define that) and you haven't voted and you get to righteously decry how it all went wrong - because YOU DIDN'T DO A GOD DAMNED THING ABOUT IT, even if you think it was just a token. In theory one electoral district could sway the whole thing and if it was yours and the difference was a (for example) just a few hundred votes (ahem, Florida, Nov, 2000) YOUR non-vote coupled with a bunch of lazy like-minded people just like you, made a difference, and there are ZERO bragging rights attached to inaction. VOTE!

2) DON'T VOTE THIRD PARTY.  I get it. The two party political duopoly is broken. You are absolutely right. And your moral high ground is noted. But your moral high ground is built upon a hill of wax and when the wrong side wins because you voted third party, and the whole country bursts into flames of ire, fear and hatred (assuming you don't believe that has already happened) your moral high-ground is going to melt into a sticky mess. Pick a real side, for Pete's sake! Only Hillary or Donald will be President on January 20th. Not Gary. Not Jill. Not Bernie by write in. Evan McMullin has a theoretical chance, but it's just theoretical. Non-zero. But really the possibility that he could win is just a gedanken-experiment that political analysts play for fun, ' cause "headlines."
I know you are disaffected and you think both the other candidates are as bad as one another. (They aren't - see #3 below.) I know you are tired of the status quo. I got it. I heard it. I am even with you for the most part... except one critical thing... NONE of the options other than the nominees of the two major parties are actually going to win, so don't waste your vote. Its practically as bad as not voting. No. I take that back. It's worse, 'cause you actually got to the polls and then wilfully did something asinine.
"But how will the third parties (the fact that that is plural is hilarious and just goes to show how ineffectual the alternate options are) ever get enough traction to compete, if we don't vote for them for realz in a Federal election?" Well for starters - this simply isn't the year. It's not. And not because this election is "soooo" historic - I'd have said that for each of the last four elections too, and at this point imagine I will in 2020. But because the foundation has not been set. The third parties need to work from the small up. You get traction locally. Then Statewide. THEN Federally. Here's the bad news - it takes a long time. I am pretty confident that I will never see a real third party in a US election. It took the NDP from before I was born until 2011 to get so far as being the official opposition in Canada. Our "fourth" party in Canada has been at it since I was 13 and has won ONE SEAT in the House of Commons in Ottawa. It grew from 11 independent candidates in Atlantic Canada with common ideals to the fledgling Federal actor it is today.  If you want a third party to bloom, it takes time, and it has to build up to relevance from small winnable contests before it can legitimately challenge for the title. Sorry. It would be great if reality was different. But this isn't the year. Go out and run locally under the third party banner of your choice in 2018 if you want to see that change. But vote Democrat (or Republican) on November 8th 2016, 'cause when you get right down to it, you DO care which of the real options prevail.

3) Vote for Clinton. You probably are voting for Clinton if you can vote and are reading this. SO, feel free to stop here. If you are voting for Trump... please work through the following... (but you won't because, I just might say something that clashes with your dearly held position and makes you uncomfortable.)

1. Are you rich and have your ability to get richer at the top of your "must haves" list when picking a candidate? Well, go fucking vote Trump then. I still think you are making a mistake. I imagine that you are making a mistake if you game-out the long-haul, but who am I kidding, you aren't listening to me anyway.
2. Are you any one or more of: homophobic, racist, misogynist, war-mongering, or sociopathic? No? Then you have no reason to vote for Trump. Just stop it.
3. "Second amendment, YAR!" Your guns are safe... or rather... your guns aren't going to be taken away from you, no matter who you vote for. Really. REALLY. But let's talk about the second amendment in more detail next week, okay? Go vote for Hillary.
4. You think Clinton is worse than Trump, no matter what he is. Okay... I know it is really late in the game to be working this angle, because none of us have much time, do we? And there is SO much to unpack here. But seriously. Take your pet argument and its reasonable counter argument and go and look at the facts. Don't take the word of either candidate as gospel. Identify any element of the argument where the two sides disagree and do some hard Googling. Google keywords about the argument. Add "pro" and "con" and "debunk" and "fact" and "explained" and "Republican" and "Democrat" to the key word searches (separately) and read more than one article on BOTH sides of the debate. If you see an article that opposes your view - definitely read that one. If articles don't provide specific references to verifiable facts, then give them less weight than those that do. (Way less, honestly.) Sleep on it all. If you still think Hillary is worse than Trump, I'm going to want to rescind point number one above about voting... but I have integrity. If you are thinking maybe there is something to the alternate viewpoint - take your second favourite argument and see how the facts stack up.
5. You aren't racist. You aren't a misogynist. You aren't a homophobe. But the US is going to hell in a hand-basket and Donald is the first candidate who is really saying it like it is. Look. This is going to be hard to hear, but he is taking advantage of you. He is. He is saying exactly what you want to hear. He is playing upon your fears (and other emotions) without any regard for reality. He is inciting you to look at everything in your life that you aren't happy with and he is blaming it on other people and promising he can fix it without saying how. "He has plans. Big plans." But what are they? You can't tell me that. "He's going to deport all the illegal immigrants." Well, that is what he says... but how does he plan to do that? You don't have to go far along his intended course of action before things become vague and unformed and unactionable. He has no interest in you. He only has interest in his own empire and the next step in building it even bigger is to be President, so he can tweak the laws further in favor of him and his kind - who have been preying on you for generations. He is turning you against people who have been preyed upon even harder than you, making you think they are the problem, when they are being victimised by him and his sort just like you. He wants you to blame someone other than him, so he shouts that he can fix the problem and points at people not too different from yourself and claims they are at fault. AND then whenever he can get away with it, he tells them similar things. He has claimed that things will be better in the United States for various minorities under his Presidency and then told other groups of people how those minorities are the ones to blame for how shitty things are. For starters, things aren't half as shitty as you imagine they are - I know that's hard to believe, but just watch a few YouTube videos about life in Guatemala or Mogadishu or Mosul or Bangladesh or really, most of the places on the planet that aren't North America, Western Europe, Japan or a handful of highly functioning metropolises scattered elsewhere on the globe. America is totally great. Still and already. And yeah, it could be better, but not by making it worse for the people below you. That is only going to make America a contemptuous place inside and out.

Donald Trump, is probably the vilest human being who has ever been this close to being your President, and that bar is so low to the ground that its almost impossible to fit under it, yet he does. It's too easy to invoke the names of some of the objectively worst leaders in the history of mankind and go Godwin on Trump, but the reality is that it is hard to exaggerate how awful he is without doing so.

FOR FUCK SAKE. DON'T DO THIS. DO NOT LET THIS MAN BE YOUR PRESIDENT.

I assure you that if you do, we - the REST OF THE PLANET - are finished with America as the accepted beacon of hope and light and the global leader of what human civilization can aspire towards. Honestly, you may not easily be able to undo the damage you have done in that direction already. The world may well have passed "Peak 'Merica," it is certainly worth debate, but if Trump is in the White House, the debate is over, you will have, with irony, made a mockery of everything that was ever truly great about the United States.
So vote for imperfect, not-a-criminal, well-prepared-with-a-staggering-amount-of-relevant-experience, first-female-to-hold-the-position, Hillary. And if that is not "good-enough," then get to work on Bernie 2.0 or Paul Ryan back-to-the-GOP-log-house or Jill Stein for Massachusetts' 5th Congressional District 2020, or whatever your version "better future" is.

White Guys 43, Black Guys 1 - Black Guys declare Victory, Chicks Shut Out Yet Again

Okay, so we’re all happy for Barry Dunham... now what?

We will all remember where we were last night when John McCain made his dignified walk across the stage and it was no longer in question, Barack Obama was going to be the 44^th President of the United States.

It strikes me as important to get this down (or 'up in the cloud') for posterity.

I was at a rather small bar in the West End with my girlfriend, Jodie and our friend Mike. We shared a ridiculous number of surprisingly good hot wings, several pints of beer and endured the cheering of hockey fans on the other side of the bar watching the Canucks shut out the Predators. The CNN feed on our side of the bar had no volume, but I had picked up wireless from the coffee shop next door and was giving additional updates and context as the projections came in.

We sparred back and forth about the value of projections. Myself on the defensive... though I guess I'll even do the other two a favour and prepare a hot dish of crow for them – perhaps I can get the bar's recipe for tangy hotness. Yes, projections in 2000 were famously wrong at a late hour, but as I pointed out they are based on a long history of statistical analysis and that the laws of large numbers make them very reliable as a whole, if individually unstable... and of course the same law means that every now and then the whole collected projection can go to hell, but that's extremely unusual and the wise money can be put on the projections. Anyhow, I belabour a point which I had the grace to not rub in then – or was it that anytime I opened my mouth I was shouted down? Anyhow, in type... "Nyah nyah!"

When McCain took the stage to concede they switched the audio from the game to CNN.

I was disappointed on some level that McCain didn't make the core of his speech something to the effect of "YOU – my own party – threw me under the bus, you fuckers!" But I have to respect his reserve and dignity. It has to be tough to know that in the past 24 hours your life has peaked. Not many of us will ever face that moment except from a long nostalgic way off, and fewer will be able to say that that moment came when we were 72 years old.

By the time Obama was making his acceptance speech, the entire place was quiet... though it didn't take long before one drunk blow-hard was sharing his opinion with everyone. Once that fellow spoke up it wasn't long before the spell had been broken for others and they too quit their rapt listening and began chatting again.

By my count it took 32 minutes from McCain's concession until Obama was campaigning for 2012. You'll recall the sentence "We may not get there in one year or even in one term."

When Obama's speech was over and the hockey game was back on I took my moment to shout the defiant sentence that had been floating in my head, ready for this very moment, for days... "Take that 'Real America!'"

No one has any real reason to believe my own claims on this, but I called this (yeah it was a 50/50 chance) back at the DNC. In a conversation I declared that Obama had for all practical purposes asked Joe Biden to be the Vice President, not just the VP candidate. My intention at the time had been that I felt this election was the Dems to lose. Over the past seven weeks I have allowed myself to get shaken from time to time into caution by nay sayers and conspiracy believers. There were arguments that were hard to dismiss, but I didn't want to believe. 'The Bradley Effect.' 'Massive digital election fraud.' 'Military Coup by Cheney.' (Okay, I suppose that last one may still be an option.) But time after time I kept coming back to my guarded optimism. Every time Sarah Palin opened her mouth; add the economic disaster that landed largely in the Republican's hands; tepid debate performance after performance by McCain; in fighting; Republican endorsements of Obama by the likes of Colin Powell; McCain's apparent frustration and eventual veiled despondency – the list goes on.

In the past week I felt a growing sense of comfort. Less and less did my doubts rise. A few days ago I told myself that it was no longer worth worrying about and that the question was now whether Barack would merely win or win by a landslide.

Last night, shortly after I arrived at the bar they called Pennsylvania in Obama's favour and I truly felt like I knew it was over. A little while later Ohio was declared his and I breathed a shuddering sigh of relief. There were a few moments where I felt emotional over the remainder of the night as I was defending the value of projections, but I had largely already processed my feelings of relief over the past week.

Somewhere in the darkest part of my soul I find myself wishing that the first words out of Obama's mouth when he stood at the podium last night had been "Allah Ackbar!" Possibly followed by "Learn your Morning Prayer by 5am January 21st or lose your tongues, infidels!" And then with a puckish grin "Heh heh... just kidding."

Today it seems everyone's Facebook status is either a statement of relief (okay, there is one exception I've noticed – a friend who falls in the category of religious right... I shake my head at their dire warning of the end of days) or a humorous comment about the sudden lack of news.

I feel lighter today, or as though I've been holding my breath for eight years.

It's like the end of a TV series. The final episode has come and gone and everyone will be discussing it for days, how in the final scene Hillary woke up and said to Bill "I just had the weirdest dream." Or perhaps it's more like Star Wars... the Rebel Alliance prevails in the final reel and deposes the evil Empire.

In any case, the sequel is bound to be interesting. He's put on one hell of a show, but now he really has to perform. It's going to be virtually impossible for him to live up to expectations, but he has the acumen to redirect those expectations towards realities both as they actualize and as they are anticipated. Let's face it, if the woodland critters came from the forest and gathered at his feet with wide-eyed adorable expectancy, it still wouldn't be enough for his detractors.