The election judge gave her an I VOTED sticker also.  This is Maryland.  There aren’t many people to vote for who are not moderate Democrats, which is to say, full of shit.  For Governor, I didn’t vote for either of those smug bastards.  How different is Maryland, really, since the last governor?  Or the one before him?  We have higher taxes and a new license plate.  But.  Still.  I stood there and knew that it really didn’t make much of a damned difference which frowning/smiling smartass I voted for.

It didn’t make a goddam difference because voting is the most that the majority of us do.

The Big Boys have us so lulled that we think that voting matters, and then we demonize people who don’t vote.  I know; I’ve done it, probably on this very blog.  Voting for one crook over another isn’t going to change one damned thing when a person doesn’t do anything else. Do we think laws are doing to save young men from lives in crime and sloth?  Or the Boy Scouts and other youth groups?  Is a piddly fine for driving with your cell phone going to stop people from the general assholery to which they are accustomed?  (Shit, I don’t know what will.)  Nothing the current government can do (much less anything they will do) is going to save any of us.  I can almost see where those teaparty nutjobs are coming from.  But, then again, morons from Alaska and Glenn Dickhead aren’t the only alternative to Washington inertia.  And, well, we all know where a lot of the teaparty rage comes from.  You know.

And we don’t even have a radical left anymore to fight the teaparty nuts.  “Everyone calm down.  Let’s work together!”  or, as Obama might put it, “I want social change, but I don’t wanna piss anyone off to get it!” The Civil War is what happens when there’s huge social change.  Lynching in the South.  Riots in the 1960s.  The obnoxious riots from the teaparty nuts are not a reaction to anything real or even threatening.  Not enough people are burning shit or really going nuts.  Yelling and signs don’t count.  This could mean that we’re all asleep (like the bumper sticker says).  But I think it’s more indicative that nothing is changing.  And I feel  like a fool for thinking, two years ago, that a lot was going to  happen.  In my (and countless others’) defense, after eight years of Bush, we were right to hope.  But we were wrong to channel our hope into campaign buttons and a vote and to stop there.  Obama told us that back then.  We sat around and waited for the magic new President to save us from the demons of the Republican party who are, you know, so different from the crooks in our own party, right?

Moderation happens when competing extremes can only work together through compromise.  It happens when neither side can win and when there’s no alternative.  When moderates and right-wing nuts fight, where would that compromise go?  A little right?  Or, since few so-called “liberals” really give a shit anyway, it might go largely right, no?

Watching people speed past kids, talking on their cell phones; learning about businesses screwing over my friends who work for them; experiencing first-hand what happens in an insurance state where no one wants to pay for you getting run over by a car; — In all this, I want more government, or, at least, more regulation.  I always say that it’s because people are assholes that we need laws.

But  our government doesn’t work.  Can any?  I thought anarchists were naive because they seemed to believe in some inherent goodness in people that I just don’t see.  But maybe they see an inherent evil in governments and power that I ignored?  Or, perhaps, I was a fool to see the lack of goodness in ordinary people left to rule themselves and also the terrible lack of goodness in people elected to and paid to lead us.

My wife chided me for voting for the Green Party candidate for governor.  She said that I threw my vote away. But did I throw it away more — or less — than someone who stepped in line behind their party (whichever it is) and hit D or R whenever asked?