My deep seated philosophy is that voting should only be done by those who actually have a clue about why and who they are voting for. We sent in our absentee ballots a couple weeks ago. If you are over 65 among other reasons, you can vote absentee in Michigan. I have never been so disconnected (for want of a better word) with why I vote. Of course it's impossible to enforce whether someone is oblivious as to the why or not rather than just disjointed about it. Certainly, if one has an open mind, actually pays attention, the who part is reasonably discovered.
Having said all that, I decided that in this case I needed to vote for a man who is a capitalist, who has played both ends against the middle with respect to the political establishment because he understands, at his level of capitalism, how corrupt the system is and know how to play it. Further, he has a towering ego, but according to everything that I can find out about him, he seems to be a rather charitable person who treats most everyone half way decently if not overly decent. He's no angel of course and he does have enemies.
His ego will make him attempt to accomplish some of the things he has talked about with respect to his slogan of Make America Great Again. I'm not fooled into believing that he is some rescuing angel, but our country is divided badly and ruled by an oligarchy. The fact that the oligarchy obviously hates him with a burning passion, is a plus in my view. If he is able to convince enough elected officials to actually begin to honor their oath and begin to swerve our nation back toward the center that will be a plus.
As for our old enemies, China and Russia, we need to engage with them as an economic partner somehow. He seems to understand this, though China has other ideas, but with the state of affairs in the world today, might just keep moving in a direction that might be benign. We need to convince them that the 3 of our nations are more threatened by the stone age, tribalist Islamists;Daesh. Being economic partners might just trump (pun intended) expansionism that is not ideal. His opponent stands against all of this and is not a capitalist, and is more closely connected to the oligarchy. A good deal of that is the military industrial complex, among others. This says nothing about who she will appoint to the SCOTUS. That will not bode well for our Republic.
So we voted for Trump. We had good reasons to do so. Voting for other candidates, in our view, became less of a matter of conscience and more of expediency with respect to the opportunity or a chance to change our country's course. The opportunity to hope to change America back to what was decent, if even a bit, is more important than selfish self interest over the good of our people as a whole. We also voted for local judges who are not so far to the right. Strict law and order judges are sometimes troublesome given the economic system that has now replaced our legal system. Strictly liberal judges are not too evident around here at the moment. Then we voted for every Libertarian candidate for all the university boards. Exercise in futility there, but you never know. Things are better changed from the bottom up rather than the top down imho, and I feel we can risk making a statement at that level.
OK, that's enough propundiating for tonight.
