Today is election day. Polls are open until 9pm in most towns
Postscript: This post was really just filler while I get the formatting of this thing the way I'd like it, but it's gotten some interesting comments from the boys of Johnson City, Jesse and Joe, which are worth reading.
There are a few things in the pipeline. But what this site becomes is largely up to you, dear reader.
This last election day was something of a sad disappointment. It was the first time since I received the ability to vote (5 years ago) that I did not vote in an election; I even came home for school board elections not during the normal November schedule.
ReplyDeleteSome people, I remember well the "Vote or Die" movement, will condemn me for not voting, but there simply was nothing to choose on. The Propositions on the New York ballot had to do with esoteric budget issues and building bridges. The candidates running for local office where the same faces, the same ideas.
As I walked through my town, Johnson City, where my father grew up and my grandfather and grandmother before them, I realized that the elections of today and the ones last year and for more many years before I was born did not matter. This town, those factories continued to decay, poverty continued to stalk the streets and hopelessness continued to drive out our best and brightest.
Don't get me wrong, I have not given up on Johnson City (which, incidentally, is next to Binghamton) or Upstate New York. I have lived in places as far flung as rural Colorado and the coast of Spain and yet still returned here. Our land is one of the most beautiful in all of the earth; only the most jaded drives up Route 81 in the Fall through the Cortland Valley without being awestruck. And who can paddle Cranberry Lake in the Adirondacks during an early, misty morning without know subtle beauty of our forests and lakes?
Yet, we need something new. We cannot simply continue to turn to the big corporations and beg them for jobs... how many times do they have to betray us before we learn our lesson? We also cannot only rely upon retail work, this only drains a community of resources. Something new is needed, or our communities will die.
We need to dismantle the ideological state apparatus that makes it seem like voting at any level is a worthwhile mode of action to fix communities.
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