Every four years, we have the same three choices: vote for the lesser evil out of fear of the supposed greater, vote for a third-party candidate who expresses your views better but has no chance of winning, and not voting. Once in a great while, it seems like we have the chance to vote for a major party candidate we think we really like (Clinton or Obama the first time around?), but they never fulfill their campaign promises — which, usually, were pretty vague to begin with.

During the 1996 Clinton vs Dole campaign, there was a great cartoon, which I still have somewhere: Dole is hitting someone on the head, shouting, “Hit him four times!” and Clinton is hitting the guy on the head, shouting, “Hit him 3½ times!” That’s pretty much your Republican-Democrat choice, and, if you live in a hotly contested state and that difference is significant to you, go for it. But either way, you’re still basically getting an actor hired to represent the imperialist corporatist state, not someone who will represent very many of your interests. (Yeah, I know, they may pick a Supreme Court Justice, who will also represent the corporatist state in either a “liberal” or conservative way.)

As you can probably tell, I’m sick of the first option, and, having the luxury of living in a Democratic state, I’m voting for Jill Stein and Cherie Honaker, the Pacific Green Party candidates. In fact, I’ve already mailed in my ballot. But it’s just an exercise, since under our current system, they not only don’t have a chance of being elected, they never even had a chance to put their platform before the electorate (Stein and Honaker were arrested for trying to get into the last presidential debate).

In this system, all votes are wasted (meaningless), because pretty much the same things are going to happen either way. I’ve seen the man (men) behind the curtain…In fact, the most meaningful option is probably to ignore the whole show and not vote. That’s not apathy or indifference — it’s a rejection of the whole charade.