George Washington, and a Call to Action
Hey folks,
I'm by no means a political zealot, nor am I a beltway insider, or grizzled campaign veteran, or any other overblown, voluntary title meant to conflate the triviality and irrelevance of what is, certainly, an ineffectual, superfluous class of social parasite: namely, those that feed from long-open wounds upon the blood of a once-great democratic ideal that I, in my short time alive, have never had the privilege to personally receive, excepting the readings of firsthand historical accounts which, as it happens, are the subject of this post.
Closer to 25 than 24 I will give the former as my age, though if you were to “check” this “fact” I'm sure they'd affix to it the nauseous, spine-like-a-slug label “half-true”, or a similarly slippery English mollusk affecting the same. I am a Liberal Democrat and Roosevelt Republican. I am a member of the NRA. I am religious. I am pro-choice. I believe in capital punishment. I don't believe in God. Climate change is real, as is the enslavement of an oppressive tax code. I draw no strength from the conviction that so many fellow Americans, including you, Necessary Reader, agree with any, all, or even just one of these positions. Indeed, my heart must so ache for the both of us, because we are then both before the sword. You and I are cloven in two at ever turn, against each other and against ourselves, sacrificial lambs for a false dichotomy that need not exist, that should not and would not but for its imposition by, and to the satisfaction of, the basest desires of simple, selfish fools.
The two reigning political parties march hand in hand toward a mutually agreed upon destruction of this republic. Those describing themselves as third-party candidates are willfully implicated directly in its termination, content to scavenge the others' battlefields, pick the spilt remains of their war chests, and climb atop old corpses to claim them as the moral high ground.
In truth, our dismantling may already have been in place long ago, bricks pulled from mortar to find new homes before the feet, then waists, then necks, and finally eyes of our grandfathers. The halls they swore to protect now walls to stifle the cries of a nation's newborns, and all generations hence have been silenced. I cannot know these things, I only feel them, and it is these feelings that defy fact-checking. These feelings compel me to act.
So now approaches the primary salvo of this internet broadside. I apologize for the infrequent or all-too-frequent punctuation, however you found it (assuming you did at all!), as well as the long-winded, overblown nature of my writing style. New England readers, a native son and expatriate asks your forgiveness, and hopes you found his words worth the light.
On Election Day, I'll be riding to polling places around my city and reciting “George Washington's Farewell Address” to the citizens in line anxiously awaiting the chance to call themselves, many again and far too few for the first time, voters. The purpose of this post is to encourage you to do the same, or at most to read the text yourself and understand better the import of its content. Washington was, as we all are, a flawed and fragile human being, who cast doubt on no one more copiously than himself, but he will always stand among the greatest of Americans, and his, at least, is a legacy that will never be subject to partisan brinksmanship of the ilk we witness on the supermassive and subatomic scales imposed by media punditry on every facet of American life.
My end desire in terms of the breadth of this text was not to exceed one page of 12-point, single-spaced font, lest you scan it's length, become disheartened, and deem your time too short and likewise precious, and as I rapidly approach that I will draw to a close. I have said this much only because I don't expect many responses to the above on this forum, it is meant only for consumption. To avoid any homonymic distortion, I have both said my piece, and spoken my peace.
Please, do you civic duty on Tuesday and vote, but don't carelessly let fall you patriotism into the ballot box. We, the People, on November 7th, will still be the most powerful force for change the world has ever known. Thank you for reading. I hope it was worth it.
George Washington's Farewell Address: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/washing.asp
