Since last Valentine’s weekend, my poor mailbox has coughed out thirteen political love notes, though they are really just self-love notes sent by candidates who are only after me for my vote. I feel like a contestant off of The Ultimate Merger, that Donald Trump dating show that didn’t survive.
I dutifully surveyed each card, shaking my head as I read the same old rhetoric and attacks that we have seen for years. We have a $19 trillion national debt, a failing infrastructure and I’m supposed to worry about “sanctuary cities” up North and out West? If those cities are like Detroit, who would seek sanctuary there?
These mailers are the equivalent of political flypaper and other than keeping the postal service in business they fail to deliver any practical information about the candidates. So, let’s consider the choices across the spectrum and since we are talking politics, we will consider them from the negative. Kick the clay feet first.
On the Democratic side, we have a candidate who truly believes in a failed economic system that even the Russians and the Chinese have rejected. Add to him a corrupt legacy candidate of a failed governing status quo consisting of gridlock and a massive national debt. That’s it. Out of 319 million United States citizens and 11 million illegal aliens, that’s the best team the Democrats can field.
The Republicans are no better. We have our own legacy candidate of the same failed status quo whose personal tepidness exhausts me. A couple of lawyer Senators whose practical work experience can be best summarized by “they toil not; neither do they spin” except politically, of course. (Don’t we have one of those as President now?) Some Governor from up North whose name I can never pronounce. A likeable neurosurgeon who might or might not have hit his mama with a hammer and might or might not over think us into Armageddon.
Leading the pack, we have an audacious megalomaniac billionaire, a type unseen since the baron-robber days, whose lack of any elected political experience, consistent political ideology or diplomatic finesse inexplicably draws voters to him in droves – a phenomena that I have never witnessed before and the key to understanding what this election is about.
This election reverberates with the frustration born from feeling helpless as our political class destroys our great American Experiment and by extension, the idea of The American Dream. Remember that dream of generational progression? An idea that a person, endowed with certain inalienable rights, who works hard and takes advantage of the opportunities afforded him may become rich in his lifetime or at least build a solid foundation for those that follow. It was the colonists dream, the settlers dream and the immigrant’s dream. It was my generation’s dream.
Nowadays, we have lost that dream to the national nightmare of instant gratification, over sensitivity and an ever-expanding government intent on destroying individual liberty under the guise of individual equality. It is the reality of the jobless college graduate, burdened with student debt, incarcerated in his parent’s basement. The loss of that dream goes far beyond a terrorist threat or an economic downturn; it threatens our future existence.
I refuse to endorse any specific candidate in Saturday’s primary. I refuse because I believe that this election is about necessary destruction, not of our constitutional government but of the bureaucracy that has almost completely strangled our future. We face a season of tearing down and I am not sure which candidate can do the deed effectively. Messer’s Trump, Cruz, or Rubio? Maybe. The rest? Not a chance.