DNC Day One

So the DNC is just about done for tonight, and I spent the whole day watching the speakers. I am always amazed at how diverse it is compared to its counterpart. Today they spoke about unity and why Democrats are the ones to move us forward with Clinton at the helm. (Bernie just mentioned SCOTUS and who Drumpf would appoint. He needs to keep hitting at stuff like that so his people will stop booing and support Hillary like he has pledged to do.) Sadly, some of the fools still resisting voting blue (as Sarah Silverman said, they are being ridiculous) just don't get it.

I have vowed to stop wading into comment sections until after November because the vitriol and misinformation are too much. They call Clinton and her supporters like myself a variety of terrible names, embrace the conspiracy theory that the DNC colluded with all of the state parties to deny Bernie the nomination, and press that a third party is the real option. If enough people vote, it can happen, they say. Obviously these people either never took a government/political science class in high school or college, they goofed and didn't learn anything, or they forgot.

We have a constitutional. representative democracy. Change happens slowly, for one thing. Revolutions don't occur overnight. Aside from that, the very foundation of how we vote paves the way for only two viable parties. We award seats in a winner-take-all fashion rather than proportionally like they do in parliamentary systems. As such, we fill Congress with people from just two political parties (Bernie being the exception). Even if enough people voted and put in a Libertarian or Green candidate (can't happen anyway since they won't even be appearing on ballots in every state, and write-ins are useless, sorry to break it to you), Congress would still be divided between blue and red. We have three branches, remember? Separation of powers and all that jazz. For a third party president to get anything done on their agenda, they would need to populate Congress with others of the same. At this point in time, that is fundamentally impossible.

(I was thinking about it, and it seems to me that third parties are way more narrow in scope. Simpler minds can't handle a larger platform, I guess. Also, Libertarians are whiny little babies who don't understand how the real world works. We live in a connected society and have formed compacts with each other and our government so that we can all succeed and live together. This has been eroded, obviously, partly by greed and partly by the mentality that I got mine, so fuck you. I experienced that first hand each time our labor union tried to negotiate a fair contract over the ten years I was there.)

If the notion that someone as vile, selfish, and stupid as Drumpf can become president isn't enough to scare people, then I fear they never were going to vote for Hillary anyway. They'll keep grandstanding, stomping their feet that they didn't get their way. It's almost like they don't understand how our democracy functions because they haven't participated before. Hillary has been hammered for over thirty years, and nothing has ever stuck. She spent her whole life doing public service as has her VP pick Tim Kaine. Sadly, that rhetoric has tarnished her, and I feel that her gender doesn't help things (though I've read plenty of women posting awful things about her).

If you want the establishment to burn down, you are selfish and short-sighted. You have no regard for the real people that will be hurt (and there will sadly be far too many). You never subscribed to our compact, and now you want to put the entire world at risk (Drumpf is dangerous, and the fact that Russians were the ones who hacked the DNC emails in a bid to help him should be very concerning). I'm tired of being nice because people like that are not rational. That's why I am staying away from comments sections, even on trusted pages that are pro-Hillary.

We need to vote blue to keep the White House, take back the Senate, and reclaim governorships. Maybe in two years, we can make the House more blue as well. The stakes are too high to protest Hillary and the DNC, and anyone who doesn't see that may just get their wish.