Something wayward of truth

The elections are coming up in just over a week and I'm trying to decide who/what I want to support.

The various state and local ballot measures are straightforward, since they are specific actions one either votes for or against, and all text of the proposed laws is also given in the ballet info booklet they sent me. The majority of them I'll be voting against because they mostly want to spend money on things. In general I think the government spends too much money on things already, so only if it's really necessary should more money be spent.

There are a handful of local political positions to be voted for--school boards, various citiy officials, and so on. These are meaningful elections, but I'm so ignorant of local politics that the choice for me may as well be random.

The same goes for the state, albeit to a slightly lesser degree. I very rarely see clearly how state issues directly affect my life, so voting for those officials is almost equally meaningless.

Finally, one gets to the federal elections, and, while I don't think this is what our founding fathers envisioned, my level of knowledge about how the government's actions affect me is most acute. Defense spending directly affects my job, national security idologies directly affect my ability to move and act in our society, and federal programs with national scope directly affect the taxes I pay.

So in order to make an informed vote, I've been attempting to research the candidates as best I can to figure out what they're about. Naturally I've been getting emails from my friends with political satire and the like, but those are good for little more than a chuckle, if that. Unfortunately, despite my earnest research, I'm discovering a disturbing state of mind emerging.

No matter who I read about or what they're saying, I'm overwhelemed with despair. I don't believe I can trust anything the candidates say about themselves or each other. I don't believe that things are going to improve regardless of who's elected. I don't understand enough about most of the issues to even have much of a position on them myself.

The more I think about it, the more it feels like an exercise in futility. Things are just too complicated and I'm just too disinterested. I can't seem to overcome the feeling that I really don't care who's in office, and that it really doesn't matter, because in the end it never has, and never will, depend on me in any way, shape, or form. What can I do but live my life within the constraints of my circumstances and do the best I can to live some approximation of I'd like to call a life?

In the end God is responsible for those in power, since none can have power but what He gives them or allows them to have. Am I being irresponsible for thinking I can maybe just leave the whole matter in His hands and wash my own of it? We supposedly live in an age of enlightenment and unprecedented empowerment as members of our society. Gone, for the most part, are the tyrants and empires of the ancient world, but to me here and now it doesn't seem too different than what I imagine any citizen of them experienced. 99.9% of everything around me is entirely out of my control, and even the 0.1% I'm implicitly claiming control over is tenuous at best.

But perhaps I'm just being lazy. I suppose I'm insinuating that I merely want a world that somehow works "properly" without my having to think about it. Such a utopia would certainly dissolve the concerns I expressed above. But I'm not going to get that utopia in a fallen world. Instead I will get a world driven by greed and self-interest, dominated by those whose desire is to dominate, unconcerned about the most vital of my petty interests unless they're shared by the majority. Personally, I want nothing of it other than to be left alone.

Maybe I should make that my universal ideology: I'll vote for whoever will do the best job of leaving me alone and ensuring that others leave me alone. I'll call it the Isolationist Platform. I'll vote against anyone who wants to take my money/freedom/etc. or tell me what I can/can't do with it. I'll vote for anyone who can ensure that the government and other people can't do the same. Unfortunately that'll never work.

So in the end (since I'm tired of writing now) I typed a lot of words without really getting anywhere. I still need to figure out who to vote for, or else give in to apathy and not vote at all. The biggest problem with indifference, however, is that I would be relinquishing my right to complain about the state of things since I chose not to affect them.

Maybe I'll just vote for myself, except that I'm not old enough to hold office in D.C. just yet...