Caution

The Iowa caucuses are finally here and I am gloomier than ever. There are going to be a lot of angry people by the end of the day. There will be gloating, there will be smugness, there will be threats, and there will be nonstop chatter from the news networks about horse races and momentum as our quadrennial contest for the chief executive of this land finally gets real. For a serious person, there are a few choices you can make. One involves reading the results of this older form of democracy and being happy that your candidate won. Or perhaps  disappointed that your candidate lost. But not forgetting that we are on the same team. Another is to get the results and immediately take to social media and go on a tirade against the other side no matter what the outcome. Either way, being a serious and responsible person means not voting for Republicans for president at any level.

I have been hearing for a while now about the people that supposedly will not support the eventual nominee of the Democratic Party if it is not their preferred candidate and really brushed it off as hearsay. I mean who is that stupid that they could make that claim and stick to it? Then I remembered that my first time voting for president I drew a little line across the optical scan card for Ralph Nader and put it in the box. Oops. So all I ask, as always is some humility and understanding. We are all so different in who we are and where we came from and where we are going that judging or scolding or other crap is just pointless. Counterproductive too. The more people tried to convince me that voting for Nader was bad, the more I dug in my heels. I rationalized that one, I had never voted before so taking a chance on a third party candidate wasn't going to shift a formerly reliable Democratic vote away from the Democratic nominee. Two, America was doing pretty well at the end of Bill Clinton's administration, there's no way people will want to take a chance on the dink from Texas. Three, Wisconsin is a pretty solidly Democratic state so Al Gore will get the electoral votes even if I don't vote for him. And finally, I was in a punk state of mind and got all my news from Jello Biafra, or at least my ideology. 

Jello taught me a lot about politics and though I have left most of the radical ideas behind, punk rock leftism was part of my political socialization. I grew up learning a little from my union member father and grandfather that the Democratic Party represented the working man. Even my foreman at the factory told me that the republicans would burn the poor to keep warm in winter. But I had served in Clintons army and was not happy with the way it was being downsized. Our commanders seemed obsessed with throwing out as many soldiers as possible, sometimes really messing up their lives in the process. And since I worked in manufacturing I was not a fan of NAFTA either. So I was going to protest by voting for the greens, that'll show 'em. 

We all know how that worked out. So please, spare everyone the tantrums. And keep in mind that despite being the minority party the GOP controls congress, the Supreme Court, and most states. The presidency is the last holdout of non-crazy and if we don't get out the vote for whoever the Democratic presidential candidate ends up being it could be the last election we ever have. There are no elections or loyal opposition in the kind of America trump or Cruz have planned.