John Quincy Adams admonished us to "always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost."
For years, we have been presented with two “viable” options in Illinois – tax, borrow and spend, or borrow, tax and spend. Either way, government grows, government gets more expensive, and government gets more intrusive. And we have been conditioned by our bureaucratic politicians to believe that any choice, other than those two generally offered, is “wasted."
I choose to look at this differently. We periodically get an opportunity to review our elected officials’ performance. We exercise our right to tell them what we think of them and how they are doing by casting our vote. This is our opportunity to grade our public servants and to tell them what is important to us.
If we don't use our vote to demand what we really want, and instead give it away to the “lesser of two evils” because our views are unlikely to be in the majority, then we are throwing away this valuable opportunity. And we will continue to get the same self-serving government that we have had – expensive, wasteful, and corrupt.
Voting should not be about backing a winner. It is about backing your conscience. You owe it to yourself to look beyond the sound bites, to understand what the candidates are really saying and what they intend to do to you. Because even though you might not be interested in politics, politics is certainly interested in you.
