Perhaps America will one day go fascist democratically, by popular vote

~ William L. Shirer

I am a ballot and I bite.  My name means ‘little ball’ and most people think I am nothing more than a piece of paper or a screen on a voting machine, but I am a dedicated – and sometimes vicious – weapon in the fight for freedom or slavery. For the past 234 years, I have had a steady diet of apathy, passion, fear, anger, victory, hope, and yep, change (some good and some evil) and sometimes, I can’t tell whether I am full of venom or love; love tastes a whole lot better but it seems there’s more poison on the menu right now.

When this amazing country was started by all those determined men and women who would have rather died (and many did) than live as slaves to the King of England, voting was a privilege that few would have given up; women fought a hard fight to get to vote! When the country was still young, men often voted by embedding their axes into a tree stump; one side of the stump was a vote for the conservative and the other for the liberal. As men became more and more involved in the politics of the emerging new country, this wasn’t as easy as it had once been, so they would write their candidate’s name on a slip of paper and deposit it in a locked box. When women won the right to vote in 1756, Lydia Chapin Taft was the first to cast her ballot; what a day that was! That’s sorta where I began, although today, I am much bigger than a slip and am much fancier, but I still do the same work; I tell your local and federal governments what you want and think.

Today, though, I have teeth and I bite. I don’t mean a silly little paper cut; I mean I can gnaw away at your freedom, steal your money, rob your children’s future, take your home, take away your safety… I can even shut you up forever so you are never heard again, even when you are screaming at the top of your lungs! I can chew up your whole life until you don’t recognize it any more.

On the other hand, I have the power to amplify your voice until you are heard all around the world, open doors to new jobs, work with you toward economic stability, help you build working homes and communities, keep your freedom, and choose how to care for yourself, your family, and your neighbors. Now, I hear you laughing at me; how can a ‘little ball’ have such power over your life?

When you use me but don’t know what you’re doing, you give me more teeth to destroy you. When you go to the polls and haven’t done your homework – and don’t know what that guy believes or that gal will do if she wins the office – you take a real chance of losing everything. And yes, I mean everything. My teeth grow longer and sharper.

When you don’t use me, it’s worse; your silence not only strengthens and sharpens my teeth, but it adds an extra row to rip and tear you with. “Silly little ball,” you say, “one vote makes no difference at all; how can you be so naïve?” Ummm, really? Let’s look at some elections you might have sat out because your vote “made no difference at all”.

· George W. Bush won the 2000 election by 537 votes out of Florida’s approximately 6 million votes;

· John F. Kennedy won the 1960 election over Richard Nixon by only 118,000 votes; or 50.1% to 49.9% of the total votes cast in the nation;

· Ronald Regan won the 1980 election over Jimmy Carter by 6,000 votes; that’s the population of just one of hundreds of thousands of small towns in America;

· The largest tax increase in history (well, so far) passed in the House of Representatives by just one vote.
Sure, you’ve heard all this before; get out and vote! Your vote counts! We need your vote!

Frankly, it doesn’t make much difference to me whether you use me or not; if I’m paper (and unused), they’ll shred me after the election, if I’m electronic, I will simply disappear when they unplug the voting machine. I can promise you that it will make a big difference to you, though; either way, I will matter to you.
Go ahead, waste me; either don’t vote at all and end up with whatever your fellow Americans want (whether you want it or not) or use me to elect those power-mad RINOs and Democrats who smile at you to your face, on your TVs, and in your e-mail newsletters, and then turn off the cameras and computers, and laugh at you, mock you, and plot how to destroy you, your family, and all your hard work, as they sit in their offices on Capitol Hill pulling salaries and benefits that you will likely never see in your lifetime. You’ll deserve what you get and I’ll be chewing away at your life, one bite at a time.

Oh, just so you know, my appetite has grown a lot over the past 50 years and Obama and his administration just keep hoping you will feed me with destruction.

I’m pulling for a diet of hope, growth, and freedom, though; they taste so much better and don’t give me the heartburn and diseases like the recent diet of hopelessness, control, slavery, and repression you’ve had me on lately.

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