Waiting for the End to Come

If you have had the good fortune to be living in a secluded bunker incapable of receiving television or radio signals, you might not know that the end is near.  Worse, you might not know how many of us are eagerly anticipating that day, welcoming the silence, the cessation of hostilities, the termination of robotic voices heralded by the non-stop ringing of our phones.

You would think that someone like me might welcome all the attention.  It’s nice to know that my phone number is known to someone other than my parents.  That warm glow of attention evaporated with the sound robotic voices, nothing more than unholy harvesters of my attention.

Our national suffering will end in less than 48 hours.

All of the election-related voices emitting half-truths and hollow rhetoric, insults and inflammatory images, they will finally be silenced.   Facebook feeds will be returned to the ho-hum minutia of food consumed and errands completed;  gone will be the postings asserting that people on their side of the discussion are clearly smarter, kinder, and better for our country, while the people on the other side are ignorant,  selfish, and “ist” (i.e. sexist, racist, ageist, elitist, jerk-ist, zombie-ist, etc).

It’ll be nice when the misleading statements and ridiculous promises we hear are related only to things like hemorrhoid cream and cable companies.

It’s hard to think that the one thing we have in common as our nation looks down the barrel of the ballot is our collective fatigue over getting harassed over the phone, in the mail and on the radio and TV.  After the chads have settled, we can all go back to the consensus generated by the state of apathy that settles over the country between presidential election cycles.

I am looking forward to returning to peaceful time when I’m ignored by the political machine, because, the only time they seem to know I exist is when they want something from me.

This year, I’ve decided to vote for the candidate that spent the least amount of money filling my recycle bin with useless mailings and my voice mail with long-winded messages that I couldn’t wait to delete.  Which, as I’m sorting the propaganda, is starting to look like a vote for Roseanne Barr.

And then, I remember that she’s well-known for atrocities against her writing staff, and I must stand in solidarity with my fellow scribes, and make sure that she doesn’t get the opportunity to nationalize her policies. By the end of her first 100 days, she’ll have ferreted out all the people who made jokes about her candidacy. She’ll have them put on a list, and rounded up for a quick trip to Gitmo. While there, we’ll all be water-boarded, and forced to watch the Conners live their lottery-lifestyle dream, over and over and over again.

Maybe I should re-think my voting plan.

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