I have not been groomed for office.  I have no polished platform full of meaningless platitudes.  I have no poll-tested rhetoric crafted to manipulate the people into voting against their better judgement time and again.  And I have no war chest provided by nameless and faceless donors who wait patiently in the background to turn the will of the people into a rubber stamp for their objectives.  What I do have is a family.  I have children that are constantly bombarded with the normalization of harm and the diminishment of their potential.  I have a job where no matter how hard I work I can't keep up with the cost of living.  I can't afford insurance and have to hope for the best in a country where sickness is an industry.  I can barely afford the monthly bills that increase regularly with no explanation.  I'm buried in taxes; on what I earn, on what I spend, on what I own, and they all keep going up while everything they supposedly pay for gets worse.  What I have is the experience that actually matters.  In the trenches of a new America that I don't consent to nor accept, just trying to survive to the next month.

 

What I propose is that our shared experience is far more valuable than what our political leaders espouse as their qualifications.  Opening up a quarter-filled bag of chips in the kitchen that costs double what it did five years ago, while being told prices are coming down, has more to do with the American experience than the list of countries you gleefully destroyed in some global chess game.  Trying to protect my kids from the war for their time, attention, and spirit is more pertinent than what side of some asinine gender argument you fall on.  Figuring out how to stop the installation of a surveillance state in every piece of technology, every police station, and on every street corner, is more important than hearing how many immigrants you're going to round up at a local restaurant.  Maxing out the last credit card with ten dollars in the bank, an empty fridge, a past due water bill, and a car payment I can't afford, is what is real; not your stump speech on the handful of new foreign companies coming to the state who are going to create a hundred jobs at some point in the next decade.  If we keep being distracted by the political bait, at what point do we get to the things that actually affect our daily lives?  And at what point do we stop following these pied pipers to the edge of the cliff and instead exercise the free will they attempt to steal at every opportunity?  The work to improve our communities, stop what we do not want, and build what we need, is ours.  The character actor in the suit with the right letter beside their name is not here to save us, only to distract us while our future is decided for us.