What If They Held an Election and No One Came?

It already feels like the 2012 presidential election campaign has gone on forever, and we're still eleven months out. Apparently, permanent campaigns will join permanent war as just something that America does.

For the first time in the 44 years I've been eligible to vote, I probably won't this time around. Actually, I've been thinking about just showing up at the polls and standing around outside carrying a sign that says, "If God had meant us to vote, he would have given us candidates." (Or would that be illegal now?)

Robert C. Koehler, writing recently for Common Dreams, explained, for me and perhaps for many others, why voting has become a meaningless ritual:

It’s not democracy that’s inadequate, but a system of representative government in which only the enormously wealthy, or those who have indentured themselves to moneyed interests, can cross the threshold into leadership positions. In such a system, those who oppose the interests of war and empire can’t possibly be represented.

I want to vote for a candidate who will end our wars of aggression; who will restore the Constitution; who will not accept corporate bribes; who will act to mitigate climate change; who will abandon the childish fiction of American exceptionalism and govern by clear thinking rather than by cliché. But there is no such candidate – nor can there be, because our system of government is not capable of producing one.

The "right to vote" doesn't mean much when there's no one to vote for.