Politics Is Ugly

Politicians don’t need any help making their profession look ugly. They do a good enough job of that all on their own. Yet with the election in the US just a day away, everyone seems to be doing their part to show just how ugly politics really is. It really brings out the absolute worst in everyone.

We have a lot of family and friends in the US and as such a lot of them are on my Facebook feed. I’m starting to question how some of them made it on my friends list to start with. Not because of the candidate they support, but because of the way they go about supporting them.

Ginger at Ramble Ramble summed it up a while ago in a really great blog post here.

It happens every 4 years. People hurl insults at the candidates and those “stupid” enough to support them. They are quick to point out the weaknesses of the other candidate. They’re not willing to concede one inch to the other side. I’m guilty of it too, to an extent. I don’t understand how anyone could even consider voting for Romney/Ryan. I feel like this because I find his views and opinions to be extremely old fashioned and purely religious-based. I believe firmly in a separation of Church and State. You can’t, and shouldn’t, run a multi-religional, multicultural country on one religion’s foundations alone. If you want to be anti-gay marriage or pro-life because your bible says so, then that is really up to you, but to enforce biblical beliefs through state laws is wrong. Typically, republicans would like the rich to get richer, and the poor to suffer. Well, that’s not true, they want the poor to do more to make themselves UN-poor, which anyone who has ever been poor knows, is not just that simple.

The disgusting thing about people who don’t like Obama is that they seem to not like him because of the colour of his skin, his name, the religion they accuse him of being (Muslim, though I’m pretty sure he’s a Christian). I have seen people on Facebook say he “Hates America” and isn’t even American himself. Four years he’s been insulted by people insisting he show his papers to prove his citizenship. Four years he’s been bullied by idiots like Donald Trump who want to take the attention off Obama’s accomplishments and put them on something petty and childish, like the long-buried discussion over Obama’s nationality. Someone please get Trump a dead horse, he seems to like beating them!

When anti-Obama people talk about him, they talk about how his name sounds like a terrorist, they say he’s a Muslim, they call him Anti-American. They don’t talk about how he saved the auto industry. Which ironically, a lot of my republican in-laws have worked in or at least live in the city most affected by it. They don’t talk about his revolutionary health care reform that makes it more affordable than ever, for more people. They don’t talk about him bringing home the troops from Iraq. They don’t talk about the jobs created.

It seems people expected Obama to come in in 4 years, clean up the mess that it took 8 (+) years to create.

It’s hard to know who and what to believe. Every time there’s a debate, everyone thinks their guy won. Every time there’s a poll, it is either heavily biased to one side or shows a “dead lock”. What happens come Wednesday morning is anyone’s guess.

For many reasons, I’m glad we no longer live in the US. There are times I miss it with all my being. There are times, like election time, that I’m thankful we’re not there. Elections are divisive, and can turn friends into enemies. Ironic that something as liberating as the right to vote, the privilege to vote, is so divisive, yet something as tragic as a terrorist attack brings the country together. What is wrong with this picture?

Linking up for #IBOT at the NEW Essentially Jess.