Aaron

I’ve spent some time explaining that Romney and Obama are different only in degree, not type. You don’t have to agree, it’s one opinion among many. If you voted yesterday, I hope you feel good about it. I do. I hope you feel you did what you could, as long as you could.

There’s a line from a Terry Prachett novel, where the Four Horsemen are fighting the forces of entropy and apathy. The archetypal anthropomorths begin to feel overwhelmed by forces they can’t fight, eaten by things that don’t hunger. Death, the most implacable of the Four, says:

WE MUST DO WHAT WE CAN.

“And if that doesn’t work?” said Pestilence.

THAN WE DID WHAT WE COULD, UNTIL WE COULD NOT.

Generally I think that’s right, and just, and noble. In another book Death says THERE IS NO JUSTICE, JUST US. Our choices are what make us human, and to the extent they are good and noble and moral choices, we become good and noble and moral. At least more than we were before.

So if you who voted please don’t take my repeated exhortation that it was a false choice, a rigged game, and generally a waste a time, to be a condemnation of your time, or to belittle your choice. If it made you feel more human to reauthorize reckless drone strikes in the middle east, or empower a new regime of woman-hating, Elmo-throttling mediocrity, I hope you feel that you did what was right, and you did it just as long and as hard as you could.

I don’t agree that either choice is good or right, but I think that doing either thing with everything you’ve got is what it means to be alive, to think about issues, and to make choices between good, bad, and ugly. Politics is nothing if not ugly.

Part of its inherent ugliness is the artificial lines drawn, the jingoistic team-building, turning neighbors into others. It’s all a joke, a lie to keep the powerful, powerful. The old saying is don’t compare apples to oranges, but Chuck Klosterman pointed out that’s one kind of pernicious bullshit.

Apples and oranges aren’t that different  really. I mean, they’re both fruit. Their weight is extremely similar. They both contain acidic elements. They’re both roughly spherical. They serve the same social purpose. With the possible exception of a tangerine, I can’t think of anything more similar to an orange than an apple. If I was having lunch with a man who was eating an apple and – while I was looking away – he replaced that apple with an orange, I doubt I’d even notice.

Set aside from the apoplectic rhetoric from *insert whichever party lost last night*, I don’t think you should sweat too much about today or tomorrow. You did what you could, until you couldn’t. In four more years you’ll be allowed to get all worked up again, because *whichever party won* will have expanded the government into all sorts of areas of life in which it doesn’t belong, committed a few travesties, murdered a few folks who mostly didn’t deserve it, and imprisoned thousands of people who never hurt anyone. Those lousy *party in the oval office*, that’s just how they roll.You can’t trust them. They aren’t like us. And their (redneck/elitist) followers will apologize for them for the next four years.

Don’t worry champ, there’s always 2016. And the campaigning season begins in a couple months.

The only really moral choice is individual choice, and nobody on the ballot (except Gary Johnson), wanted you to exercise that. This world is what we make of it, and that *idiot you didn’t vote for* doesn’t want you to use your own creativity, just to follow (his/his) assumed, immoral, and unjust authority.

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