I Voted (American Revelation: Final Judgment.)

It is now the moment when by common consent we pause to become conscious of our national life and to rejoice in it, to recall what our country has done for each of us, and to ask ourselves what we can do for the country in return. ~Oliver Wendall Holmes, Jr.

I voted.

I went and voted this morning, my polling place is the township hall and it's right down the road from my house.

Despite the fact that I saw more people there than I ever have, more than at my previous polling place at that time of the morning, either, too. It wasn't quite as many people as I saw in 2004 and 2008 but both of those years I voted in the evening, so maybe it was more crowded on that count. I don't know.

But today...today just has a different vibe than, well, most days in the last five years, to be honest.

And that's good, because frankly I'm just tired of this goddamned flaming shit show and that's really all there is to it.

I'm tired of this gold-plated orange asshole and his endless contempt for everybody but himself, I'm tired of his gibbering Twitter posts and his monotone speeches and his drooling idiot followers and I'm tired of the endless bad faith of the manipulative sociopathic fanatics who play all of the above like a fucking cathedral organ for no better purpose than lining their own pockets and pushing an ideological and religious agenda that anybody to the Left of the 12th Century should have a problem with.

I'm tired of the fact that conservatism itself has been jacked to the point where even somebody like Ronald Reagan couldn't recognize it.

I'm tired of the fact that the party of Lincoln, of Eisenhower and of Reagan embraces Confederates and Nazis and Communists with equal gusto and seeks not to do so in order to change them, or even gain some advantage but simply out of star-struck admiration for other authoritarians.

I'm tired of the fact that the party of the guy who said "Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, Tear down this wall!" has become a party not of men like Ronald Wilson Reagan, the man who won the Cold War, but the party of the angry shitty little John Birch Society fanatics who'd have walled off America and left the rest of the world at the mercy of Soviet Communism for no better reason than their own cowardice and insularity.

I'm tired of people who've never been more than 100 miles from where they were born and never even seen, or made the effort to see, one thing that would cause them to question the things they believe, and who are proud of that fact. I'm tired of those fucking people trying to dictate to the rest of the citizens of a multiracial, pluralistic democracy...and the rest of the world...how we live our lives and what we should do.

I'm tired of the people who think the way we teach our history should be nothing but a warm yellow stream of self-affirming drivel that tells them nothing about their own country that they don't want to hear. Don't piss in my ear and try and tell me it's raining. I'm an American, I used to be a Republican, I served my country and as an Airman I got to see quite a bit of the rest of the world.

America is a great country, but like all countries have it's done some evil things. If we don't confront our legacy of oppression, of racism, of warfare against the undeserving be they Indigenous or Iraqi, how do we expect that we're ever going to do better than that? Take it from a recovering addict, you have to admit you have a problem, that you have an addiction, before you can find sobriety.

Doing nothing but telling yourself how great you are all the time tends to get you nowhere. Let them beat their plowshares into swords and their pruning hooks into spears and let the weak say that he is a mighty man.

You have to love your life more than you love your Sin if you want to overcome it.

And perhaps more to the point, as somebody who's seen some of the world's dark and dangerous places and witnessed the aftermath of Man's inhumanity to Man on an industrialized scale in places like Bosnia and Kuwait, I'm fucking sick and tired of Americans who see other Americans as enemies and who will not be satisfied until they witness mass killings of their own fellow citizens that are done for no better reason than the fact that they're shitty little haters.

I, being a former Republican, voted for Joe Biden. Not because I necessarily like him, but because it's him or Trump.

And we don't need four more years of that crap, period.

It's America or Trump.

We don't have a thousand years of history. We don't have one common ethnicity, one culture, or one language. We're the melting pot, the superpower built by the sons and grandsons of another teeming shore's huddled masses that yearned to breathe free.

We're America, all we have is what we want to be.

And that's what this election is about.

This is American Revelation. This is our judgment of the sheep and the goats, Today.

If you haven't already, Vote.