Ladies and gents, it all comes down to today.
Months of campaign banners littering our roadways, TV advertisements spewing half- truths while simultaneously interrupting our “Modern Family” obsession and news about who’s the angriest at whom all come down to today.
Months of Floridians “getting to work” and talks of Tea Party turbulence peppered with rallies to restore sanity find their match today.
It’s not yet winter, Gators, but our favorite time of the year makes its let’s-hope-for-no-hanging-chads-this-year debut today.
It’s Election Day. And we hope you’ve survived the type of take-no-prisoners political carnage candidates have subjected us to since … well, has it ever stopped?
This is the day your little black pen becomes the star. This is the day when no number of campaign sound bites and no amount of bipartisan bickering can steal your spotlight.
No, Gators, this is your day. Steal the show.
This is the day in which millions upon millions of campaigning dollars boil down to one simple fact: each and every one of you carries an equal weight at the ballot.
This is where T. Jefferson & Co. start smiling and flashing their Founding Father grins. This is where the beauty of our country lies.
And this is also where they would probably shake their big-wig heads in shame.
With the freedom given to us so many years ago to elect the people who vote on our behalf, many of us choose to, well, keep watching “Modern Family” instead of voting.
And voter apathy is one of the biggest destroyers of our democracy.
Nothing makes less sense than those who chastise us for voting for this person or that person while not having voted at all.
We heard Republicans moan and admonish those who voted to enact the historic 2008 election of President Barack Obama as Democrats also took control of the U.S. Senate. And later tonight, all of us will probably endure the cries of disconsolate Democrats, who may lose control of their picture-perfect majority created just two years ago.
Aside from the fact that we think an apparent majority of Americans might not be lending the Democrats in power a fair shot of pulling the country from the eight-year wreckage of Afghanistan, Iraq and a financial collapse, we won’t be too mad at anyone when we wake up Wednesday.
But if you have no intention of voting and are indifferent toward the whole process, consider yourself deleted from our Facebook friends, or at least hidden from our news feed. We’re just not interested in anything you have to say anymore.
We won’t hold any grudges if you vote a fraudulent man into our governor’s office, or a woman who mistakes Hispanic people for Asians into a Senate seat in Nevada, or even a woman who doesn’t know where the separation between church and state clause can be found in our Constitution (sorry, Mr. Madison) into a Senate seat in Delaware.
A lot of people are going to be depressed Wednesday, regardless of whatever the outcome might be, but that’s what the next election is for.
We’d much rather you exercise your right to vote for someone we didn’t vote for than not have voted at all. We really enjoy heated political pow-wows about how the person you voted for is messing up our lives. And if you don’t vote, you force us to have conversations about nothing more than our new shampoo.
Today’s the day, Gators. Take your spotlight at the ballot.
