It’s time for change in America and I’m not talking about the promised changed that President Barack Obama or Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney can bring.
I’m talking about bringing hippies back. Is that word even politically correct? I can tell you that if I wasn’t just an infant in the mid-1960s, I could see myself as one, minus the drugs that were associated with that subculture. That group of hip, youngsters was known for its awareness of the issues, especially politics and for bringing those issues front and center in a non-violent way.
Change was needed in this country 50 years ago. Change is needed now, too!
The Civil Rights Movement gained ground in the 1960s and across college campuses around the country, anti-war protests dominated the mid-1960s and the early-1970s. Sadly, at one of those protests on May 4, 1970, in Ohio, at Kent State University, the Ohio National Guard shot and killed four people and injured nine others.
And, just last year, massive protests in the streets of Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, and Libya, just to name a few, prompted major changes in the government and some of these protests evicted leaders that had been in power for decades.
I believe that people should be able to speak out against government and leaders in a non-threatening fashion. Leaders need to know what the people they lead are thinking. From this point on, I’m talking about the United States.
We need a revolution here in America just like the one that John, Paul, George, & Ringo sang about in the fall of 1968 on the flip side of the “Hey Jude” single!
“You say you want a revolution/Well, you know/We all want to change the world
You tell me that it’s evolution/Well, you know/We all want to change the world
But when you talk about destruction/Don’t you know that you can count me out
Don’t you know it’s gonna be all right/all right, all right”
At the onset of this blog, I mentioned President Obama and Mitt Romney. While there will be other candidates running on various other tickets, the reality is that in America today, only a Democrat or a Republican will win the White House.
I looked at the presidential elections from 1980-2008 and the best year for a party other than the Democrats or the Republicans was 1992 when Independent candidate H. Ross Perot earned a surprising 19% of the popular vote that year. While Perot received no delegates, his 19.7 million votes probably made George H.W. Bush a one-term president.
(1992 Popular Vote: Red indicates the 43.3% of the votes cast for Bill Clinton, the blue for George H.W. Bush’s 37.7% of the votes, and the green is for Ross Perot’s 19% of the votes.)
In 1996, as a candidate for the Reform Party, Perot earned 8 million votes, which was 8.4% of the popular vote.
While I will be voting for President Obama in November, I would love to live in a country where the election could be won by a party other than the big two!
Recently, I took an online quiz that matched me with a candidate that shares my views and while I wasn’t surprised to see that I should vote for President Obama, the runner-ups surprised me because I had never heard of some of them!
Candidates you side with…
88%
Barack Obama
on economic, social, foreign policy, science, and immigration issues
82%
Gary Johnson
on social, domestic policy, immigration, healthcare, science, and environmental issues
67%
Jill Stein
on foreign policy and environmental issues
63%
Ron Paul
on domestic policy, healthcare, and science issues.
So, who are these other people who I agree with on many things that are important to me? And, why, in America, can’t they really have a chance to be my next president?
Jill Stein is a doctor, who was born in Chicago, Illinois, and is running on the Green Party ticket. Former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson is vying for President on the Libertarian Party ticket and U.S. Representative Ron Paul from Texas was one of the many candidates that tried to secure the Republican nomination for President before losing out to Mitt Romney.
We live in the greatest country in the world and it’s time for us to make a third and fourth party viable to win a November election and take the White House. Maybe if that was a possibility, we’d have politicians that really worked for the people they represented and elections wouldn’t just be the lesser of two evils.
I think it’s time we let our hair grow, wear fun, colorful clothes, work toward peace, and make love, not war. Maybe then, our voices would be heard — again.
Anthony
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