So I voted in the provincial election today.
And for once, my voting was fully informed.
You see, one of the local papers (I want to say… the Vancouver Sun?) put out a very excellent article containing a one paragraph summary of the three major parties positions on 15 key issues.
That’s 45 paragraphs total. It was quite a detailed read.
And I love, love, love that the fucking BC Liberals were not included in that article because they are just plain not a major party any more.
For decades, they were the center-right party in BC. But over the years they drifted increasingly to the right, no doubt due to the influence of the by the cunts, for the cunts right wing lunatics from down south.
Come on, join the driveling lunacy! It’s fun! You get to be all mad and stuff! And you get to say just the absolute worst things you can think of and get patted on the back and told you’re a patriot and a good Christian for it!
Every day, I wake up and ask myself – who would Jesus hate?
Ahem. Now where was I?
Oh right, the BC Liberals. As they drank gallons of the lunatic right’s Kool-Aid, they basically became the new Conservative party, leaving the actual provincial Conservatives with nothing to campaign on except, “What they said. Only meaner. ”
Remember, modern conservatism is always, at its heart, bullying.
As they became all things to no people, they lost their entire raison d’etre and failed in their important role of letting conservative yuppies pretend they have not sold out.
So they had their Election of Doom, where nobody fucking voted for them. And the already heavily left coast province I live in officially shifted to the left.
Now the three major parties are the mainstream left party, the BC NDP, and the further left people, the Green Party, and the surprisingly scrappy BC Conservatives, who have now cornered the market on frothing lunacy.
If I was them, I’d sell, because that brand of conservatism is dying fast as the actual non-yahoo conservatives remember that they want sane, sensible, responsible government and the frothy types alienate the entire modern movable middle by behaving like people no decent person would want to be associated with.
And the sub-lunatic right absolutely must think of themselves as decent people. Solid. Respectable. Reliable. The “right” kind of person.
And the right kind of people don’t take a shit in Congress.
Well, not in any but the most metaphorical sense, anyhow.
So… I voted. Right… that’s what I was talking about.
And I was able to vote over the phone, which was awesome. I had no faith that wherever our polling place was would have a distance between parking lot and voting booth that I could handle.
And of course, I would have had to wait in line, which is impossible for me.
So I did it over the phone. And there was a bit of a struggle because the first lady I talked to both had a fairly think East Indian accent and I had to strain to hear her over the usual cacophony of a call center.
There has to be a way to design one of those so that the conversations do not overlap so much. But I suppose that would cost more money.
Anyhow, so she got the usual deets – name, birthday, address, oh and the ID number on my “driver’s license”, AKA my BC ID.
She also got me to verbally certify that I did, indeed, have a disability or medical condition that kept me from being able to vote in person
As opposed to just being too fucking lazy, which is not a disability. Yet.
I actually had to do that three times. I guess they want to be absolutely sure. Then a different lady read the names of the candidates to me, I told her my vote (BC NDP), then a third lady came on the line to verify that this was, indeed. my vote before she cast my ballot for me.
And then we were done!
More after the break.
Sometimes there’s pain
Sometimes, my rock-strewn path to victory involves a lot of pain.
Growth often does. Rebirth doubly so. And I feel like I am working up/towards a very painful and bloody rebirth indeed.
Real change has to hurt. Not for some “you need to earn it!” punitive ethos, but because the hardest thing to change is yourself because it involves changing the very foundation of what and who you are and how you see the world and experience life.
That foundation is you.
In case I hadn’t made that clear.
So to change that requires something akin to performing surgery on yourself. The thing doing the cutting is itself part of what’s being cut. And odds are the existing structure of your psyche, however dysfunctional, will violently resist this change via the mechanisms that keep our minds intact and stable in the first place.
And that’s where the pain comes in. The existing structure of the mind is saying, “Ouch!” in very clear and unambiguous language.
Pain is nature’s way of saying, “Hey! Don’t do that!”
But I don’t care about the pain. It’s not like it would be keeping me from doing anything important. If it means I have to lie in bed and work my way through the suffering involved in getting rid of the bad and letting in the good, so be it.
Sometimes it does feel like surgery without anesthetic. Other times it feels more like dialysis. Like my mind is slowly clearing out toxins that have been in my bloodstream for so long that my body thinks it’s normal for them to be there.
The simplest definition of “normal”, after all, is “what you’re used to”.
Other times there’s a kind of thrill to it, or even a sense of adventure. Things are changing and growing and getting better, and it’s all so terribly exciting.
Wish it was like that more often, to be honest.
Well, maybe I will be strong enough for that some day.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow;