Why I'm an independent.

Nasty old habits die hard in blog-land. I’m thinking about the two-party system. People really feel their “parties” (and self-identified “ideologies”) exist to fight evil, namely the other party. I’m especially alarmed by the volumes of people that somehow think politicians, specifically the guys from their team, can be “good”. There are a few that manage to rise above the fray occasionally, but you can be sure a nail that stands out gets hammered down.

To allow yourself be judged by a mailing list we’ve ended up on, by what affinity group has claimed us, correctly or not as a member, by what opinion we ought to have by reason of geography is the worst kind of surrender. It’s surrender out of sloth.

When we willing identify ourselves by labels, what we’re saying is we’re willing to have our own self-determination substituted by the loudest assholes that share our label. We trade the self doubt that might come from be loyal to our individual nuance for the easy comfort of the group, where it’s all too easy to borrow the words and thoughts of others without ever truly cognitively owning them.

Let me be clear, I’m not advocating suspension of social action. It’s just social action through the channels of established institutions (read Dems and GOPs) perverts individual integrity and lets the pure thought get strained through the dirty sock that is DC.

On a fundamental level, the parties are mirrors of each other. They are two models of the same machine, distilling thought down to discreet little portable poots of rhetoric, to be packaged and retailed to the mass market.

Our elected officials (GOP and Dem) are so far removed from real public discourse that they can only manage to interact with normal, sane people as platform-surrogates. There is no personality there. Take away the meaningless party affiliation, I’m not sure that they would exist.