My Campaign Speech

Now there’s talk of troop withdrawal from Iraq by 2011. Prices at the pump have dropped forty cents per gallon in the last couple of weeks, and Bush’s weekly radio address continues to use the phrase “we need to get the oil from the bottom of the ocean into your gas tanks”. How stupid are we? How malleable are we? How much deception can we tolerate? I, for one, am going to buy as much heating oil and gasoline as I can on November third, because that will certainly be the least expensive day of the year. The republicans will guarantee that, and will undoubtedly congratulate themselves publicly for the service to the American people.

Once the votes are counted, or even predicted prematurely by the media, long before they are counted, the price will rise to where it was when there was no contest. Maybe not that day, but it won’t take long. How much more blatant can the manipulation be?

Am I paranoid? No. The situation is obvious to anyone willing to live in the darkness of our time. We’ve elected (kind of, but not really) a president who has done so much damage to the global community that we fear for our lives. We fear for the survival of our country, and we fear that we have allowed this to happen. The rest of the world knows we have allowed this to happen and frowns upon our ignorance. The mongoose has drawn the snake near enough to make a meal of it. Snakes… we fear snakes, but what we should really fear is their predator.

This administration would like to keep us in fear. It spends a good deal of its time weaving stories of fear, stories that will make us afraid. And we are afraid, but we are afraid because this man, this president, this person who has helped destroy the individual lives of so many who believed in him, wants us to be afraid.

Fear is a weapon of mass destruction more powerful than any nuclear or biological device could ever aspire to be. Fear keeps us engaged, prevents us from straying, and prevents us from reaching out for what might be the truth. There are others in the world who know this and use it as the weapon it is.

Our president, and those who support him, are no different than those who strap explosives to themselves and press the detonator. It is all about fear. They have instilled in us the fear of change: the one thing we absolutely cannot afford to be afraid of.

My son will be seventeen in December. I will not let our government take him from high school and send him into a war that never should have begun. I will not let him surrender his life to the whims of political aspiration. If I must, I will take him from this country to anywhere that is not ruled by fear, if such a place still exists.

I have nothing. I have nothing but my opinion and a family that has shed me as a locust sheds the shell of its birth. But I still care. I care about what happens to the child that won’t speak to me. I care about my son and my two daughters because I want them to believe in something other than hatred and fear, which is all they know. There is nothing more important to me than the next. If there is something I can do to make what might be next better than what is, or what was, I feel obligated to participate. It is my responsibility as a father, as a son, and as a human being.