Opinion |

Don’t Push Your Political Ideals on Me

Let me decide how I vote without your biased leaflet

By Aaron Smith

Posted on Monday, October 24th, 2005, 12:00 am

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I don’t normally like to express my views in articles because I know, somewhere down the road, I’ll end up saying something that will contradict something I’ve written. It could be fifteen years in the future. I could casually mention to one of my friends how I’m enjoying Fahrenheit 9-11 and I’ll hear, “But didn’t you put down Moore in 2005? I’ve got the issue right here.” However, something has come up and I need to break my silence.

I saw a van the other day on I-95 and I don’t think it could have passed an inspection, even at Wal-Mart’s auto center. Metal was hanging off of it, bumper stickers were plastered all over and the tires were almost flat. It had a few cool bumper stickers, though. One read: “Keep Maine Green.” Another read: “Ban Clear Cuts,” and next to that one was a sticker that had “Phish” on it. What I found interesting was there were plumes of black smoke coming out of the tailpipe forming the word “hypocrite.” Please, keep views to the voting booth.

Expressing political views and protesting started to eat away at me after the 2004 election. Before that, I thought that President Bush was so outnumbered he was going to receive a negative number for electoral votes. I was even afraid to vote for him because I thought some anti-Bush protester might be spying on me as I voted, and greet me with the sharp end of a John Kerry signpost upon exiting the booth.

There were tons of protesters everywhere, at UMaine, all over the United States, and yes, even on MTV. I started to wonder why I was seeing so many protesters against George Bush and none against John Kerry. I know Bush was the president at the time and protesting Kerry wouldn’t make much sense, but I expected to see some people that wanted to vote Bush again. Why didn’t I see a lot of Bush supporters? Were the supporters working full-time and supporting families? Were the supporters fighting in Iraq? Were the supporters hiding in their homes until the vote, afraid of being killed for showing their support of Bush? Maybe the vote counting computers were hacked to swing the number of votes in favor of Bush. We’ll just have to wait for another Michael Moore movie.

But everyone knows Bush was elected president. I was so shocked that I had to have one of my friends punch me square in the throat to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. I still couldn’t believe it, even after the awesome throat punch. To verify the reality, I turned my television to the best news source of them all, MTV. All I saw was a choked up Kurt Loder, and an angry, suicidal P. Diddy – Puff Daddy – Sean Combs – Diddy going crazy. That was also the day protesting was rendered useless.

Well, MTV got its record numbers of voters thanks to their “Vote or Die” campaign, so what was the problem? Was it that MTV was secretly pulling for John Kerry in an obvious attempt to dethrone Bush? Or was it that MTV viewers were mad because they suddenly realized their music television channel sucks? You do the math.

How about taking the dumb “Vote No on 1″ signs down, and replace them with “Vote on 1″ signs. I feel that it’s useless trying to convince someone to adopt your views because everyone has unique views, plus they could snap and kill you.

Instead of grabbing people on their way to class and saying “Mister, please vote no on question 1, Maine won’t discriminate,” just let them go to class without having some other burden on their mind. I also thought that Maine already had policies on discrimination but I am not going into that situation since I don’t want to say anything I would regret. Excuse me- I have to go take a lozenge.

Aaron Smith has yet to be assaulted over words he’s put into print.