Technically this has never been a two-party system; it's just that these two parties have garnered most of the funds needed for an effective advertising campaign, and it's easier to maintain power when you have it. There are always many people running for local office on some other party platform than the Democrat or Republican one, and if you manage to send them to Congress or even your local Town Board instead of a Democrat or Republican, then that opinion will be heard where it counts, where the laws are made. The laws that allow you to carry a gun, worship where you please, breathe clean air, drink clean water; the laws that outline how much tax you have to pay and what your taxes pay for: just about anything you don't decide for yourself is decided by some government somewhere, so it will affect you in some aspect of your life, and so if you don't want your life hijacked by rules you don't agree with or approve of, then you're being really stupid if you don't vote, because your vote is a representation of what you believe, and those that govern you need to know what you want in order to serve you, which is what you are paying them to do. Even if you hate this entire form of government and would prefer revolution to reform within the system, the system is at least capable of and subject to being changed. Just one example: laws were changed when the "white" males in power finally felt bad enough about not letting their wives cast a vote, and then they were changed again to ensure than "nonwhite" people would be allowed to vote. This is just one of many aspects of the rules of this country which were adjusted to reflect the evolving views of its citizens. I don't know anyone who doesn't want to have some level of, if not total, autonomy; but by not voting, not participating in this democratic process, you are ceding control of your life to people you know very little, if anything, about. The system is far from perfect, but there never was and never will be a system of government anywhere that is perfect, because access to power is too powerful a temptation for a human being to resist.

Consider religion as a parallel to political parties, because it deals with schools of thought. There is not, in the world, a choice between just two religions. Not even in the USA, where I know there are a lot of people who think we're either Christians or Jews, and all Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Shintoists, Atheists, etc. etc. somehow live somewhere else. We have all kinds here; that's one of the great things about this country. Well, we also have all kinds of political flavors. Not all Republicans are also Conservatives, not all Democrats are Liberals. Not all Socialists or even Communists were exterminated by McCarthy. Those in power need to know where you stand if they are going to do their job, which is serve us the people. "Majority rules" is the maxim, meaning a Democratic president won't be speaking for a lot of Republicans on a lot of issues, but for many aspects of our lives, the lowest common denominator rules, for instance protection under the law for every single citizen regardless of pick-your-flavor etc., oh, I don't know, for example a woman's life if it's threatened by pregnancy complications. So how about this hot button topic: the Choice versus Life schism. The Choice people believe the Life of the Mother is more important than that of what the Lawyers call a potentially nonviable human, whereas the Life people seem to believe an adult or teenage woman's life is less important than that of an unborn baby. If this comes down to an issue of religious conviction, then the argument cannot have a place on the political stage since the USA will not preferentially support one religious view over another. But people have made political parties around this sole issue anyway. These people don't think the lowest common denominator rule applies to them, or more accurately, to those who violate what they consider to be a universal moral law, even though it's just their own idea of what's right. They confuse dogma with ethics, and assume ethics are universal. For them life starts at conception and outweighs the prior conception of the woman who has just conceived. So let's take religion out of it for a moment. Let's imagine what the Atheists think about abortion. I have seen no polls, I doubt any have been taken, but I would expect some Atheists to be in favor of the choice, at least in terms of the health (NO AIR QUOTES) of the mother, to abort, and some would not be in favor. I personally know women who believe in their right to abortion but expect they wouldn't be able to go through with it if it were their own pregnancy. So it comes down to whether it is a crime or not to have an abortion. (Current law says no, with many restrictions: this is what the Life people are so upset about.) Some religious groups deprecate abortion but are more tolerant of proactive non-pregnancy, with various degrees of what they'll tolerate, from abstinence only to including the Morning After pill. But even abstinence is a method of managing one's eggs, just like abortion is, and since, outside cloning, we can only get humans from human eggs fertilized by human sperm, the issue becomes whether it's morally right to either manage one's eggs and limit family size, or to try to get pregnant every time one ovulates, leading to families of 10 or more children over a woman's reproductive lifespan. In other words, does life maybe begin at ovulation, not conception? Why is choosing not to conceive acceptable while choosing to abort a fetus conceived during a rape unacceptable? (And no one talks about whether spilling sperm is a form of abortion: I won't belabor it here, except to say that the sperm makers have generally written the laws.) From there the issue becomes: what is the purpose of being a woman? Should women have the choice to be anything but incubators, since only they can bear children? Or should they have the right to choose never to procreate and do something else with their lives? It's not simply a question of what religious temple you attend, and in terms of the Law, your temple's tenets CANNOT be part of the argument, because the Constitution says so. If you don't like it, you can move to a country with a more religiously-connected government, like Indonesia or Iran. I find it curious that many of those who want the Government off their backs in terms of telling them what they can do with their lives, businesses, whatever, don't seem to see a contradiction in that they would prefer that the Government do step in and control what a woman who doesn't share their beliefs can and can't do with her own body; and also they seem generally in favor of the Death penalty, which we are occasionally reminded results in the killing of innocent people, innocent as those little babes they're so bent on saving. (I have a friend who calls this Pro-Life-Pro-Death. Catchy. My mother's advice: "if you're against abortion, why don't you adopt some of these unwanted babies you love so much? You'll take in a stray cat, why not a human?") But back to the common denominator idea: we protect the rights of minorities in this country to live as they choose, within reason. Pedophilia is one example of an activity which no community tolerates, but wearing a head scarf or skullcap to physically express one's religion in public is tolerated by all communities (I HOPE). So a line has to be drawn with the law as to what we will and won't allow. In terms of when it is and isn't OK to kill a potential human, the law currently draws it in the middle of gestation, but no one draws it at the line I alluded to, that of the egg in the Fallopian tube destined for oblivion due to a condom, spermicidal foam, or absence of any male donation, even though the only differences beween an unfertilized egg and a fetus are the number of chromosomes and the number of cells: both are potential humans. The majority of Americans currently agree with the law as written, just as the majority currently agree about alcohol: see below. So until people and the legislators they elect change their minds and decide that killing a potential nonviable is a crime, the law seems to be correct for the mood of the majority; and EVEN IF the majority believed, for RELIGIOUS reasons, that abortion is murder, if they can't prove it outside their own belief system, the common denominator rule still applies and we must default to protecting the life of the mother.

Let's take a (currently) less contentious topic: inebriating substance intake. Devout Muslim and Mormon citizens of the United States, among others, do not consume alcohol. This is based in each of these communities on religious beliefs about what is right, which does not include getting drunk or even buzzed. Most modern Americans, however, do not consider responsible alcohol consumption by adults a moral offense against the Creator, Creatrix or Creators of one's choice or heritage. The current laws of the USA reflect this: it is legal for adults to drink alcohol, and we can choose to drink it or not. In the case of THC, however, the current law declares its consumption through use of maree-wanna a crime, even though it is not addictive, as alcohol is for many people, and ingestion of its smoke is no worse for one's lungs than smoking tobacco, which has never been illegal, even after it was determined that overuse of tobacco will kill you. This is what we call a DOUBLE STANDARD, and agree or disagree, it is enshrined in the Law of the Land. That Law is written and approved by those people who run for office, and whom we pay to be in that office, so I don't care what it is you do in life, the laws of this land will affect you, and the only way you have to affect THEM is to choose who writes them.

To recap: under US law we do not have the right to kill ourselves, but we currently have the right to do many things which run the risk of killing us, such as skydiving or smoking, and we also currently have the right to take steps to prevent our death, such as aborting a pregnancy which threatens the life of the mother. We have the right to consume some substances which alter our brain chemistry, but not others, even though the degree of alteration or addiction is no worse or even less than that of the legal substance. These two issues are governed by the laws of the United States, both federally and locally, and this country's way of including Joe the Whatever in the decision making process of these laws is by having them choose who gets to write the laws. So if you don't care what the government tells you to do or not do, or what the government tells a corporation that wants to put a factory nexto your house what to do or not do, or if you don't care what your tax money buys, by all means don't bother voting. Now, back to the Two Party Myth.

Let's assume you ARE going to vote: if you don't do the work necessary to find out which party REALLY reflects your views and just assume you are either a Democrat or a Republican, you are not voting responsibly. On this Information Superfreeway, you can find out right from their own websites what each of the parties with a Presidential candidate is all about. So check out the links above.

Now, on to more issues. These will almost certainly not be what the Elephants and Donkeys talk about, which is usually the proximal issue of money. Funny: they are trying to get a job that you will pay for with your taxes but they keep saying they'll cut your taxes. Both parties. This can't be the most important issue. We have to have a government, otherwise some other country will take us over and impose their own government on us. (Oh, wait, we just tried to do that somewhere in the Middle East, didn't we?) So get over it: the government is here and it's what writes the laws. And the government needs your money to exist.

The quality of our air is, it should be needless to say, important, because we need to BREATHE, yet those in power from 2001 to 2008 weakened the laws protecting it so the poor beleaguered Energy Industry could have an easier time selling their energy to us, including energy subsidies to oil companies including Exxon which had back-to-back world record profits this year. Does that seem right to you? The water we drink can not possibly all come in bottles from Fiji, it needs to be clean out of the tap, yet the Bush administration fought to the last against attempts to mandate lower mercury concentrations coming out of coal-fired power plants which pollute the water table. That is because the poor beleaguered Energy Industry (one member of which, the above mentioned Exxon, in the past year made the largest profit in history around the same time it managed to get itself out of paying the originally settled-upon cleanup fee for the disaster in Prince William Sound.) put up a lot of money to get them into office, and this was the payback. Does that seem right to you? (This also applies to all the fish we eat and is why we're advised not to have more than one tuna sandwich a week. That's mercury from coal-fired plants contaminating our fish supply. Does that seem right to you?) Whom should we elect, people who will continue to try to weaken these protections our government has created with their laws, or people who will uphold them? Who gave the most money to get Bush elected? Whose campaign did they finance this last time around? I doubt it will be a clear-cut answer either, because these corporations are masters at hedging their bets; and they'll be back next time, using their money to get the laws rewritten in their favor, because this country was based on economic freedom, not individual freedom (or the Amendments would have been included originally), which is why none of the several Socialist political parties have a lot of power. Remember: the ideals of socialism do NOT necessarily and ineluctably lead to totalitarianism: the two major parties just want you to think that so they can maintain their power base. Socialistic ideas worked into American laws have never led, nor can ever lead, to a new Red Empire. Meanwhile we hemorrhage money and jobs to an actual totalitarian regime, sanctioned by members of both political parties: China. Does that seem right to you? Does ANYONE remember Tienanmen Square? Tibet? Hello??? How we deal with foreign countries is controlled by, yes, those elected to national office and those subsequently appointed by them. If you don't care if every single manufacturing job gets siphoned off to some town or other in the Third World where these great companies can get away with paying their workers a few dollars or less a day for the same work an American used to get twice minimum wage for, then sure, don't vote.