May none but honest and wise men ever rule under this roof (White House). - John Adams, 2nd US President, and the first one to live in the White House (1735-1826)
I imagine that John Adams has been a regular whirling dervish in his grave since November 2, 2000. So let us end his vortexical torment. Get out tomorrow and vote. Vote the bastards out of office if you have any love for this country left. If it doesn't matter to you it sure as hell matters to the rest of us. Some reports say the determination of the election came down to a couple of hundred votes in Florida last time. If that isn't incentive enough, consider this. The next president will have the Herculean task of restoring the treasury to some semblance of order. Whose administration will achieve that? The friends of the man who gutted a surplus and ran up a debt so vast that it may take the efforts of your great-grandchildren to eliminate?
Are you one of the baby-boomers? How do you plan to spend your declining years? Have you practiced saying "Do you want fries with that order, Sonny?" Counting on nonexistent help from Social Security?
One of those sheep who believed the "Company" had your best welfare at heart, so put everything into the company retirement plan, only to let G.H.W.B's fiscal policy provide the Company with the biggest landfall ever seen, in the form of converted retirement set-asides? Have you scrimped and saved, sacrificed to the future for the good of your family and the generations to come? I didn't think so. The combination of the survivors elation of many of the troops returned from WWII and Korea, mixed with the horrors of the Great Depression that most experienced as children forged a generation that created, in your parents or grandparents, the drive to provide for the future.
Maybe you are one of the postwar generation, "Baby Boomers." The baby boomers are spendthrifts, given everything they ever desired and more; most of those gifts were squandered. They (we) possess a total disregard for the future, preferring a "the future will always take care of itself, Grasshopper," attitude. They think (thought) that Social Security would be enough -- it was for their parents.
Then there's the "Disaffected," AKA Gen-X, my children's peers. "Future? What future?" seems to be their credo. Meanwhile, their children have had even less discipline than they had and they were sorely lacking. And being clueless gits in the first place, they think Ronald Reagan, George H.W. and George W. are (were) all (choke) "Great Men" with absolutely no understanding of history to back up their misbegotten opinions.
Or, perhaps you are one of the forgotten generation -- the twenty-somethings struggling in an apocalyptic post-dot.com landscape to make heads or tails of the failure of the future you envisioned. Clueless of history, believers in a Technicolor, technological, polyglot future, where the solution to "problems" will be a few lines of code and a hit or two of "Exstasy." Get real. Because life is real, life is earnest. failure will leave you trodden down in the dust. No cell phone cum Palm Pilot cum camera cum walkie-talkie cum GPS cum tampon-pulling appliance will solve your ills or put food in your Technicolor refrigerator or on the plate at your favorite hash house.
All of us -- all of you have but one thing to do of earth-shattering importance tomorrow:
VOTE
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