I'm not quite there yet....

Well, this week was almost, almost the week when I just threw up my hands and said to hell with it.  This campaign is the most vapid, issue-less campaign wrought with inanity and outright  lies.  Here is how I came to that conclusion:
First, I made a short  list of the 3 most significant issues facing our country (my opinion), and here they are: the inability to discuss, deliberate and agree on the major issues facing the US; two, causing us to fail to deal with the long term and short terms problems, (infrastructure failure, educational deterioration, unfunded public liabilities owed to ourselves, and three, our failure to engage in the war (in every respect) between the ideals of freedom and liberty and those of control and obedience espoused by fascist, racist, fundamentalist, and economically repressive regimes and groups.

I didn't pick problems like money in politics because I that list is a micro list of the bigger issues.  I have to look bigger.

Now, since I believe as I do that we can only seriously attack these issues when we confront them like citizens respectful of other beliefs, I find it essential that any leader I vote  for be someone who has the capacity to earn the respect of more than a simple majority of the citizens of this country. And an essential element of earning that respect is the capacity to be believed and trusted.

Hence my dilemma.
I do not, and cannot trust either Donald Trump (who continues to make statements that are either intentionally dishonest or incredibly uninformed), and Hillary Clinton (who has set the standards for trustfulness so low that she thinks not being charged with a crime a badge of honor.)


And Bernie Sanders fades into the sunset (retiring perhaps to his third home to write his memoirs of the "movement' he started), the pundit class begins their rancid clamor that a vote for third party x is a wasted vote.

Well, that's where I nearly threw up my hands and asked myself what the hell?

Despite all the problems we face and the promise of a making us better, this election has come down to whether a habitual liar can convince a majority of voters that her opponent is a dangerous kook.

But for me to do that, would be to become what I have beheld. I can't stand in front of you and teach and preach that you can make a difference, and then quit on that idea.

So I am going to keep doing what I do; I am  going to search out the best candidate that I can trust. I will not find any candidate that agrees with me on every issue, but I want one who I can trust to listen, to think independently, to protect the ideals we profess to believe in, and to tell me the trust, every time they speak.

And if that is a wasted vote, if casting that vote helps elect one of those candidates for which I cannot vote, so be it. At least I will not be complicit in further corrupting a system that, in forsaking its ideals, has sunk to accepting the lesser of two evils

Kurt