BY DON NELSON
I have decided that a life in elected office will never be my fortune. For one thing my campaign ads would be entirely negative. I would envision an ad something like this:
If you believe that the best use of your tax dollar is to support big business and large oil companies – DO NOT VOTE FOR ME.
If your religion instructs you to believe a woman has no choice about her health and reproductive issues – DO NOT VOTE FOR ME.
If you believe the right to vote is not a right for every citizen and that some citizens ought to be prevented from exercising that right – DO NOT VOTE FOR ME.
If it is your conviction that public education needs to be defunded and privatized – DO NOT VOTE FOR ME.
If you are in agreement that large for-profit prisons are good for society – DO NOT VOTE FOR ME.
If affording the children of impoverished families a nutritional diet and adequate clothing and shelter is at the bottom of your list of priorities – DO NOT VOTE FOR ME.
If you see no reason to address current climate change issues and agree with the science deniers – DO NOT VOTE FOR ME.
If you cannot abide the thought that equality applies to every human being – regardless of race, gender, sexual preference or economic station – DO NOT VOTE FOR ME.
If you are OK with spending your tax dollars to build up the military while ignoring the needs of society – DO NOT VOTE FOR ME.
If you truly believe that corporate entities are equal to and deserve the same consideration as individual citizens – DO NOT VOTE FOR ME.
If you view the 2nd Amendment as a sacred sacrament and see it as allowing free and unfettered gun ownership to anyone – DO NOT VOTE FOR ME.
If you want to deny citizens – your neighbors – affordable healthcare and look upon anything but privatized corporate managed systems as evil socialized medicine – DO NOT VOTE FOR ME.
If I gave this more thought, the list would be much larger. But you get the gist of what I am saying.
We can ill afford to pander to the purveyors of conservative – make that regressive – policy.
Upon further reflection I would continue my list of reasons to NOT VOTE for me with the following:
If it is your conviction that business owners have the right to treat their employees in ways that reflect their personal religious biases – DO NOT VOTE FOR ME.
If it is your position that social welfare programs are wasteful expenditures that create dependency – DO NOT VOTE FOR ME.
If you believe that the way to motivate the jobless is to pull the last remaining source of economic assistance out from under them – DO NOT VOTE FOR ME.
If you believe the majority of welfare recipients are getting one over on you – DO NOT VOTE FOR ME.
If you feel you have been exploited and set upon by the government – DO NOT VOTE FOR ME.
If you consider yourself independent from, and not responsible for, societal needs – DO NOT VOTE FOR ME.
If it is your conviction that anyone can find a job and those that are not employed are lazy and unwilling to seek a job – DO NOT VOTE FOR ME.
If your religion has convinced you that young women who, through whatever circumstance, are pregnant deserve to suffer ridicule and impoverishment – DO NOT VOTE FOR ME.
If for any reason you are beset with feelings of superiority when the less fortunate, less educated members of society are mentioned – DO NOT VOTE FOR ME.
If, for any reason, you see yourself or judge yourself to be “higher classed” than your fellow citizens – DO NOT VOTE FOR ME.
If it is your feeling that you have no responsibility to participate in the on-going, ever-continuing work of building a better society in which all people have an opportunity to better themselves, through education, health care, job opportunities and housing – DO NOT VOTE FOR ME.
If you, as a male, consider your place in society somewhat more important than your female counterpart and are perfectly OK with unequal pay for the same job – DO NOT VOTE FOR ME.
If it is your desire to see the continued drift toward unfettered and unregulated business practices – DO NOT VOTE FOR ME.
If you deem the individual more important than the collective whole and believe that the best path forward is objective self-interest – DO NOT VOTE FOR ME.
If you see nothing wrong in the attempts to subvert and tear down the United States of America from within – DO NOT VOTE FOR ME.
To take this one step further – if I were to be so naïve as to seek elective office – I would declare as clearly as humanly possible: if you identify with anything I have listed, I do not want your vote.
– Don Nelson lives in Lawton, OK and is a frequent contributor to The Oklahoma Observer
