America the Beautiful Hot Mess

Hola Revolutionaries! As of the writing of this post, I don’t know who will win the election. The “data” says Obama will, but my gut says Romney. That’s mostly because my gut usually expects the absolute worst in every situation. It doesn’t really matter all that much who wins though, not because “They’re all alike!” or because “They’re basically the same person!” but because this country is almost completely ungovernable. We’re out of control here and nobody seems to be able to reign us in. We need a complete overhaul.

The first thing we need to do is change the way we elect our president. Hell, we need to change the way we elect everyone from Dog Catcher on up. Does anyone actually live in a place where the Dog Catcher is elected? Where did that “He couldn’t get elected Dog Catcher” come from? If it was an elected position I would run for it and hand our fliers showing how much I love dogs and how much they love me. That way people would feel like I wouldn’t hurt their wittle pup-eeee if it got loose.

Having two main candidates and a slew of crackpots and potheads running for president isn’t really the problem. I’d be fine with fifty candidates. What I hate is that the two major party candidates raised and spent a combined TWO BILLION DOLLARS this election cycle. That’s an outrage. Most of it was spent on TV ads that were ignored, bitched about and even cut out completely by people who watch things on their DVR or online.

What’s worse than that though is how we actually vote. We simply MUST nationalize our voting laws. We can’t have fifty states voting under fifty different laws. There needs to be some sort of consistency here. And to me, that consistency would be to do all voting by mail. Every state would have to send out the ballots one month before the election and they have to be post marked by the day of the election when sent in. There should be ballot collection places all over town and it should be made as easy as possible. Get rid of the rigged touch screen voting machines, get rid of the punch cards, butterfly ballots and especially get rid of all the little quirks that each state’s laws have. It’s maddening and results in people giving up trying to vote in many places.

Then we have to do something about the length of the campaigns. People are already trying to position themselves for the Iowa Caucuses coming in up in 2016! The party primaries drag out for months and months and of course fundraising has to start a year or more in advance. Then the general election is a whole summer of negative ads, people yelling at each other, fake outrages, fake scandals, GAME CHANGERS and all the other stuff that helps turn voters off.

Then we’ve got to completely overhaul infrastructure in this country. We can drive a remote controlled dune buggy around Mars, but if the power goes out for two minutes here in Redneckville, the cable, phone and internet takes two hours to get back online. We need to modernize our electrical grids and move utilities underground. We need to shore up coastal areas from New Orleans to Florida right up the East Coast to NYC that have been ravaged by storms over the last decade. We need to improve the public transportation systems all over the country including building high speed rail to connect major metro areas and we need to repair and replace hundreds of thousands of miles of highways and bridges.

We need to end the wars both abroad and at home. End the war in Afghanistan; we’re not accomplishing anything over there now, if we ever were at all. Stop meddling in the internal affairs of every tiny piece of shit country all over the globe and focus on protecting our borders and our people. Most of all we need to end the War on Drugs™.  It’s the longest and costliest war we’ve ever fought and Drugs won a long time ago.

What’s most important though is that we need to remove the most important obstacle to doing these things. We have to stop letting the 20 to 30 percent of the people who oppose all forms of progress and who believe every tinfoil hat conspiracy that shows up in their email every day. We’ve got to stop appeasing these people, ignore their “It’s a plot by the United Nations to take over and turn us into a Socialist Islamic Theocracy and outlaw Christianity” bullshit. Let the Lizard Brains just stew in their idiocy and the rest of the country full of normal, intelligent and reasonable people move forward.

Yeah, I know. You’ll only agree to this if YOUR GUY wins.

Fuck you America.

Jayman
Jayman3768@gmail.com
@Jayman_IWS