nerd’s eye view

Yoo Hoo, Candidates, Over Here!

January 11, 2008 – 8:32 am | by nerd's eye view

I admit it. I’ve been woefully remiss in following the elections. I’ve been sloppy in my attention to politics in general since the mid-terms and even then, I wasn’t really focused because I was too depressed. This is a lousy excuse, but there you have it.

Lately the feeding frenzy leading up to the November elections is demanding more and more of my attention. It’s not just because I have an immigrant husband who’s never been in the US through an election before, though that certainly has added a lot to our lunch break conversations. It’s not just that we have cable so, like loads of other pop culture junkies, I can get my politics from Stephen Colbert and John Stewart. It’s not just that people keep sending me links to crazy political news. It’s a lot of things all rolled into one.

Regardless of the cause, I’m paying attention now. I sincerely doubt that any of the candidates are paying attention to me (part of the problem, really) but just in case, here’s what I want from the next administration. Congress, this is for you too. Listen up.

• Restore civil rights and repeal the Patriot Act, already. Jeezus. Hey, while you’re at it, could you maybe enforce the freakin’ Geneva Convention, too?
• Enough with the guns. I’m not so naive as to think that guns can become illegal, but hello, you have to take a class and get a license to drive a car and you have to renew the damn thing every four years. Is it so much to ask that you require that for a gun? I don’t think so.
• Stop letting employers and insurers control my health care. Check it out. Because I work for agencies that don’t provide insurance for their W2 workers, I also don’t qualify for many self-employment. Because I do project based work, when I was on a plan, I had to bounce in and out of COBRA every three months or so. Employer based insurance has Got To Go. Yeah, yeah, you’re on it. Are you going to deliver?
• We broke it, we bought it. Not only do we have to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but we have to implement some kind of Marshall Plan to rebuild those places. What a mess. Good god.
• Stop letting Detroit and the Big Oil determine our energy policy. My 07 car exceeds the new CAFE standards. That doesn’t tell me that my car is awesome; it tells me that the CAFE standards are way too low. We should be experiencing some kind of industrial revolution for transportation, but instead, we’re stuck in 1985.
• End the paranoia. We’re in some crazy future-meets-McCarthy phase with the TSA and no fly lists and a faceless enemy who’s out to get us. Dude, they have a face, there was this guy, Osama Bin Laden… remember? That doesn’t warrant wire tapping and reading library book lists. Knock it off.
• Prioritize, for the love of god. Are you really signing a bill that advocates a National Day of Prayer instead of working on ANY of the above issues? Oh. My. God, I can’t even look you in the eye I am so disappointed in you.

I got lots of other stuff, like, oh, stop blocking same-sex marriage rights, quit with the faith-based nonsense already, find ways to restore the US manufacturing market (for the record, I am not anti-global, but if we don’t start building and selling US made stuff again, we are in BIG trouble), get some perspective around immigration policy (see how Europe is blowing it? Wanna do that?)

I’m hugely patriotic. It’s all that living abroad. I think the US is awesome. It’s a place where a weird art school kid can (sort of) grow up with no apparent marketable skills and still go on to be self-employed, own a house, and take plenty of time off to see the world. That kind of open-ended we can do anything thinking is, to my mind, a uniquely American point of view. We don’t need credentials, we’re not bound by traditions that say we can’t because we’re [female] [ethnic] [a little peculiar] [whatever]. I believe in Camelot, and not the Vegas Excalibur version that we have now. But I’m not going to Washington so yo, candidates, pay attention. You don’t even have to guess what I want to hear. I just told you. Want my vote? Are you listening?