{"id":596,"date":"2012-06-05T18:32:41","date_gmt":"2012-06-06T01:32:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/poisonspur.com\/?p=596"},"modified":"2015-03-30T17:16:22","modified_gmt":"2015-03-31T00:16:22","slug":"poll-my-finger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/poisonspur.com\/?p=596","title":{"rendered":"Poll My Finger"},"content":{"rendered":"

Imagine this. During the Battle of Bunker Hill, a volunteer patriot (whom I’ll call “Nathaniel” because it has an old-timey ring to it) takes a British musket ball through his left ventricle. \u00a0He drops to his knees, screams out “For Liberty!” and then falls over dead. \u00a0Or maybe he screams, “Ow fuck, that hurts!” That fact remains that he makes the ultimate sacrifice to make our great democracy possible.<\/p>\n

So this morning it was my time to do my bit by voting, admittedly pretty small potatoes compared to poor long-dead Nathaniel. \u00a0I almost forgot to do even that. \u00a0I was sitting in a cafe this morning with my coffee, bagel, and laptop. \u00a0I was checking email, Facebook, Twitter, anything to avoid finishing my latest fiction endeavor that’s taking way too long already.<\/div>\n
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One of my Facebook friends updated his status as having just finished voting. \u00a0I had completely forgotten that it was election day. \u00a0OK, I thought, I’ll read up a bit on the candidates and initiatives during lunch so I won’t be a complete idiot when I go vote after work.<\/div>\n
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Then I started to reconsider the whole vote-after-work thing. \u00a0I was pretty sure I was going to need a cocktail\u00a0and the folks at the polling place are likely to give me serious stink eye if I show up there with a drink in my hand. \u00a0I therefore had no choice but to give myself a five-minute crash course on the issues and take care of my civic duty in the AM.<\/div>\n
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As for initiatives, there was some shit about term limits and a proposed new cigarette tax. Yeah whatever. \u00a0I then moved onto the primary candidates. \u00a0I knew I couldn’t bring myself myself to vote for Dianne Feinstein. \u00a0Hell, I’d vote for Charles Ng if he were running against her. \u00a0I took a look at who else was on the ballot and decided to go with David Levitt. \u00a0I didn’t know much about him (still don’t) but he’s apparently a pro-weed computer geek and that’s good enough for me.<\/div>\n
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Boom! I was an informed voter and off to the polls I went.<\/div>\n
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Everything was going as planned as I was marking my selections on the ballot until I got to the section for the US House of Representatives. \u00a0I supposed I could have voted for Nancy Pelosi and probably would have if there were no one more amusing to choose from, but there was one opponent named “Summer Shields” and I just couldn’t help myself.<\/div>\n
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I left the polls thinking, “Sorry Ms. Pelosi, but I had to go with the candidate most firmly committed to feminine hygiene.” What a clever boy I was and I couldn’t wait to brag about it online.<\/div>\n
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On the BART ride to work, I googled “Summer Shields” on my phone. \u00a0I was surprised to learn that he is male, which is no big deal, and also found out that he is a follower of Lyndon LaRouche.<\/div>\n
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Oh dear fucking God! \u00a0I actually voted for a LaRouche crazy.<\/div>\n
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I’m OK with other kinds of crazy. \u00a0One of my greatest joys came in 2003 when I got to cast my vote for Larry Flynt to be governor of Calfornia. I also made it a habit \u00a0to vote for Ellis Leonard Keyes, a perennial mayoral candidate who was also the founder and (I believe) sole member of the Party of Life. “Life’s a party. Spread the word,” he would often say regardless of context.\u00a0But Larouche crazy is just plain ugly. It’s paranoid, psychotic, anti-Semitic, and oh yeah, they say the Brits are out to get us as well. \u00a0If I had just put a moment’s forethought into what I was doing, I could have avoided emboldening one of these assholes.<\/div>\n
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So Nathaniel, there in your resting place for these 237 years, I really must apologize. \u00a0You and others like you gave your lives so people could live in a country where we can freely choose our representatives and leaders. \u00a0Of course, you don’t get to chose whose freedoms you die defending, and as luck would have it, you died defending mine.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Sucks, doesn’t it.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Imagine this. During the Battle of Bunker Hill, a volunteer patriot (whom I’ll call “Nathaniel” because it has an old-timey ring to it) takes a British musket ball through his left ventricle. \u00a0He drops to his knees, screams out “For Liberty!” and then falls over dead. \u00a0Or maybe he screams, “Ow fuck, that hurts!” That … Continue reading Poll My Finger<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5,1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/poisonspur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/poisonspur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/poisonspur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/poisonspur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/poisonspur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=596"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/poisonspur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":597,"href":"http:\/\/poisonspur.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/596\/revisions\/597"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/poisonspur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/poisonspur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/poisonspur.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}