How?

I confess to being reduced to merely asking this simple childish question as I think I no longer have any idea of what is going on.

How, for example, can anyone take seriously what is going on in our current Presidential race? How can you deal with a candidate who changes his positions every time he opens his mouth? How can you take seriously a candidate who obviously knows nothing of foreign policy but gives a major speech on the subject during which he manages to say virtually nothing? How can you cope with a campaign in which a candidate lies repeatedly, even admits he lies, and then just goes on lying? How is it that chronic lying is now consider both right and proper because during a campaign “everyone does it?” How can you take politics seriously in a country where half the population doesn’t bother to vote, most who do vote are so misinformed as to be more or less useless in terms of making informed, intelligent choices? And how can the contest between Obama and Romney be too close to call when Romney has managed to alienate virtually every voting block there is other than his racist “base?”

As I can see no conceivable reason for voting for Romney, given his apparent lack of any consistent program or values, his unbelievable lying and flip-flopping, his lack of likeability and rather dismal record as a governor and businessman, I have concluded this is an election basically devoted to racial hatred. As there seems to be such a lack of enthusiasm for Romney on the part of both Republicans and Democrats, it appears to me people will really be voting against Obama, and as Obama’s record is pretty much middle-of-the road (in spite of the mythical figure of him they have created) , the vote against him must be more because he is black rather than anything else. It is not hard to find people, especially around here, who firmly believe a Black man does not belong in the White House, a situation that violates everything they have been brought up to believe about racial differences and inequality, sad but true.

Having virtually lost interest in this ongoing farce I now wait impatiently for it to be over. Everything considered, I believe voting for Obama is the better choice, but of course I would prefer someone less warlike, less committed to empire, less in bed with the big banks, less interested in overlooking civil rights, and, indeed, more socialistic in intent. But better to have a real person than an empty suit.

In the part of this universe that we know there is great injustice, and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying.

Bertrand Russell