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Getaclewis

I'm a ghostwriter and book editor - there are a lot of amazing and inspirational stories that deserve and need to be told... so I help shape and polish the writing first!

I'm a mom of two teenagers and the wife of an amazing man and, at heart, a loner who doesn't like to be alone. Some days, I want to jump on the bed and laugh joyously and, other times, I can barely suppress the temptation to crawl under the bed and hide from the world. Bi-polar? Nope... just a girl!...

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(How To Avoid) VOTING FOR DUMMIES

Ohhhh, don’t go there, I keep warning myself. I mean, it’s not like you want to EXPOSE yourself to the world, right? If you tell THIS secret, you just might get kicked off this site once and for all.

Hi, my name is Cheryl and I vote Republican.

There. I’ve said it. And, yes, I can hear that swift, hissing intake of breath that just swept across the possibly cancerous air in front of computer monitors everywhere.

She did NOT just go there!

Now Nikki (I did NOT just call you Nikki, I’m praying to myself) … before you send a raging message to the Web gods to yank my password privileges, please hear me out.

To be precise, I’m more of a Libertarian, but those votes, as a rule, are just wasted. I know – I’ve been guilty of contributing to sabotaging elections before without intent. (You’re welcome.) As with everything else in my life it seems, I prefer to fly under the radar of political discussions. I have my views which, candidly, are a work in progress since it has yet to become my life’s work to discern between which politician is merely reeeeally good at oratory (that someone else has ghostwritten – I’m a ghostwriter, so I knoooow these things) and who has stepped out on a soapbox of courage out of severe self-destructive tendencies and inner mission.

Some want to change the world and have spent their lives doing the legwork that sets that in motion; others seek the worship and power (and ulterior reward) that comes with saying you’ll do so. This is in every race – not just presidential and I’m not saying I’m omniscient enough to spot the imposter.

Here’s what I do feel (and voters, for the most part, are likely with me on this – we vote what we feel instead of what we know, since it seems possible to truly know so little – politicians just tell you what they believe you most want to hear, right? They do, after all, want to WIN!):

Sure, there’s a history of previous voting habits that can be examined, for those who’ve been around long enough to leave that legacy. But even that is not cut and dried.

I dated a politician once. It was illuminating to see why votes go the way they do. Sometimes it has little to do with the issue and puhlenty to do with relationships and that next vote, next week, on an entirely different but oh-so-important-to-their-own-agenda matter. It was also profoundly disheartening (notice we did not continue to hang out together) to hear the whispered just-thought-I’d-drop-by-your-office-and-can-you-BELIEVE-that-he-didn’t-vote-for-you-today-we’ll-just-see-how-much-support-he-can-garner-for-that-little-thing-of-his-he-was-hoping-to-pass-it’ll-be-a-cold-day-in-hell-you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours-you’re-a-good-ol’-boy-no-YOU’RE-a-good-ol’-boy-ain’t-we-got-it-all-figured-out-cuz-we’re-so-clever-blah-blah-blah conversations that passed in the corner of his office.

In fact, I’m not even sure an honest politician can be effective in office. There is an entrenched system of back scratching that pervades the very essence of political gerrymandering (ok, I have no idea what that word means, but for some reason it was time to say something that sounded fun – I have no stomach for extended political discourse and really needed a shot of ice cream right there) and I’m not sure that can be avoided.

If you want something as a politician, you have to be willing to give something. Away. Sometimes at the expense of your constituents and those who belieeeeeeved in you and trusted you to know their hearts and vote their preference each and every time.

I know good people who have taken office and been shut down at every turn until they, too, started playing “the game” to get things done one way or the other. (“The other” was the one that might haunt them later but sure seemed to make a helluva lotta frustrated sense at the time.) Either that or they were ineffective and left/got booted in the next election cycle. (There are easier - and less intrusive - ways to make a living, y’know.)

OK, back to those voting habits. I know of few other ways that we, as the American public, can identify who will carve out for us the world of our dreams (or please please at least steer clear of our nightmares). I’ve done the homework and received the emails detailing where each candidate stands. I’ve lined them up against my views on issues that matter to me and chosen.

Among them: I’m a woman in a man’s world. So what about women’s rights?

Sarah Palin does not believe in abortion – period. No extenuating circumstances considered. Kids should be taught in school, she says, that the world began with God’s nod and they should honor Him enough to put their hormones on hold until marriage.

(No, she’s not running for president but, conceivably, McCain could die and she would be in the position to rule the world… um… wait… well no, she could be resisted by every politician who felt differently and was pressured by constituents to vote differently and, sure, she could be overruled – that is the way our government works, in the end, isn’t it? – but her opinion and ability to appoint Supreme Court justices – I did read somewhere that the president can do that, right? – could reshape CHOICE into Told Ya What To Do, Now DO It!)

Well, I’m not into being told what to do, I must confess. That’s why I am more of a Libertarian. I am deeply offended by government telling me how much of the money that I’ve miraculously managed to finally earn – even if it’s only hundreds – that I have to give to them – historically, inevitably, to spend foolishly. No arguments from we the wee people allowed. I don’t like the way we are told we should be giddy to tax the wealthy when the raw truth is that encouraging rather than discouraging their participation helps the economy prosper. More jobs, more money spent in stores, more wages. More food for my children, more smiles on my face.

I don’t like them telling me they can run my life despite my certainty that I can do it just fine, thank you very much. I don’t like the way young women are now convinced that the simple act of bearing children – lots of them, if you please, with myriad fathers thrown into the mix – entitles them to a lifetime of welfare support (leached from my paycheck and yours). I don’t like the way the new imminent domain laws thumb a grand ol’ government nose at families who have worked HARD to protect their progeny for generations to come and for what? “I Want It And Now It’s MINE!” the government can freely say.

Sigh. I suppose I would’ve been one of those surging through the streets before the Boston Tea Party, stirring up the Earl Grey for more than Sunday sipping, to enact change. I have no idea whether those rabblerousers were Dems or Reps… to me, Whigs and Tories have more to do with Charles Nelson Reilly and Tori Spelling than the unopened, pristine pages of my high school history book. (Still, if nobody ever read the thang, how did all that graffiti get in there?)

But back to abortion. It’s a topic that may be impersonal political ammunition for the sides of the Do or Don’t, Can or Can’t, but for many of us, the mere mention wrenches us deep into the grief of a waiting room where personal choice translates into intimate loss. The arguments of When Does Life Begin? lose their ferocity or certainty alongside the memory of the heartbeat the technicians must first detect before they waltz you into the next room to extinguish it.

There is no doubt about it. Abortion, for many, has become an acceptable form of birth control. That, I suspect, is what Sarah wants to stop. I feel that she feels adamant about that. It is a belief borne out of her deeply cherished faith and concern, yes, for women (and the lives within them).

I know some of you well. I know how this stirs you up and how you want to throw your computer across the room, just in hopes of smearing my image across the wall. “How can you not GET it?” you’re screaming. How can I not see that it’s no one else’s business whether or not we choose to accept what we blended together inside us? God forbid, what if a man violated us and we’re expected to deliver his spawn (albeit an innocent child)?

I want to pretend I can wrap my defense up in a tidy package, but I can’t. I’m the woman who says I want to protect children, right?  But the debate over that legislation is about Me. I intensely mourn the two babies that I aborted – but not every day. I, after all, did get my life back and that is what I wanted. I wanted to erase the mistake… no wait… I wanted to erase the bad choices that left me carrying life. I wanted to avoid the consequence. And the beauty is that no one ever even had to know.

That is Choice.

My only dilemma is that I wish someone had taken it away from me. I wish that I hadn’t had the option of that choice at a time when my world was upside down and my choices for dinner were more competent than my choices for life. I wish I had chosen differently.

Ah, there’s that word, again.

In the end, I do believe in choice. Reluctantly… tearfully… I believe that, just as I was able to choose… even while my personal experience led to immediate, consuming regret that has not expired… other women must be able to steer their own lives.

God save us all.