My age group barely votes, and the most common arguement is that “there’s no one I want to vote for.” They base this on the most common political arguement since John Kerry’s failed campaign: they’re hypocrites who flip-flop. Politicians accuse each other of this, and the media looks for this evidence like it’s the Pentagon Papers. Take, for instance, The Daily Show: every weekday, Jon Stewart features a recent quote from some notable politician, and then plays video of said politician saying the opposite weeks or years earlier.
Is it too much to ask our leaders to stick to their guns year-in and year-out? After all, the government should be able to resolve all of the problems we have yet to settle after too many mojitos at Ruby Tuesday: poverty, war, taxes, race issues, abortion, time travel flaws in Back to the Future, whose round is it, global warming and so on.
What these non-voters fail to realize is that politicians are an extension of our own indecisiveness:
- We want to catch terrorists before they kill people, but we don’t want to be monitored by the government.
- We want cheaper oil, but don’t want to invade more oil-producing nations. And we want to drill more oil here, but we also want cleaner water and otters.
- We want to see less poor people during our commutes, but we don’t want to pay more taxes, and killing them all is, apparently, out of the question.
- We don’t want gays in the military or women in combat, but we had better not get drafted when recruiters can’t fill their numbers.
- Gay sex is gross because it involves anal and oral, but (heh) we want to do that stuff with our girlfriends.
- We want 17-year-olds to be tried and punished as adults, but we don’t want 18-year-olds to drink. (How come we don’t want any adults to be tried as minors? It’d make a great defense for teachers who have consentual sex with their students.)
- We want our entertainment to be chock full of sex and violence, but we don’t want our children to see it. And we want to control what our children see, but we also want to work at high-profile jobs and go on vacations without them.
- We want fast food that tastes disgustingly good, but we want it to be healthy like a home-cooked meal. On a related note, we love spicy food, but hate diarrhea.
- Communism is evil, but so is capitalism.
- Our president is an idiot, but is nefariously deceiving us to strip away our rights, fly planes into buildings and invade other countries.
- We accuse the media of covert political bias … at the insistance of openly biased sources like Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Moore and Arianna Huffington.
- We want to know everything about our favorite celebrities … until they become political. We also want those celebrities to be normal, good people, but we also want to hear about their DUIs, bigotry and infidelity.
- To paraphrase Chasing Amy, men want their women to be sluts in bed and virgins everywhere else. On the other hand, women want predictable sensitive men, but also want unpredicatable jerks.
- There’s no more racism or sexism, but white men are still uncomfortable watching black male porn stars (especially with white women), and we ask questions every election like, “Is America ready for a [insert minority status here] president?” Oh, and immigrants can come to this country, but they had better speak English right away; stay out of our neighborhoods, schools and hospitals; and not take our jobs. And despite all of this, we think people who are openly racist are worse than those who look both ways before telling a joke.
- And who can forget this everyday gem: “I think abortion is morally wrong, but I wouldn’t take away anyone’s right to it.” At the moment of personal crisis, this thought turns into, “I don’t want to have a child, but I don’t want to put it up for adoption because that will ruin his or her life.”
So of course politicians like John Kerry, Mitt Romney, Dick Cheney, Hillary Clinton and all the others flip-flop. We do it every damn day, so how else can they win our ever changing votes?