We interrupt this reflection of horror-themed posts to ask, beg, plead with you to vote tomorrow—if you’re eligible to do so in the United States. One thing I’ve learned over the past couple of decades is that polls cannot be trusted. The future of democracy rides on this election. Some people have asked me why I don’t write more about politics. I used to. That was before they began driving people insane. Shock-jock techniques don’t work well for a presidency, and I don’t doomscroll. I barely read headlines. I try to use my time more productively than worrying about the very dangerous state we’ve been in for two years now. Tomorrow is our chance to say if we’re happy with the way things are going. A pointless war in Iran. An ego-soothing congress. Prices that make being middle class feel somewhat lower on the scale than it used to.
Polls lull people into complacency. They’re based on samples and samples are, well, only samples. I’ve bitten into chocolate chip cookies (vegan) and come up with samples that distort the number of chips used. Charts and graphs and projections don’t bring results. Voting does. And please, if your polling station uses electronic voting machines please read the print ticket before hitting submit. In some early voting tampering has been discovered. One thing we know about con-artists is that they cheat in any way they can. Please don’t let them cheat you on this.
It takes quite a lot of effort for me to break my embargo on writing on the state of the world. It has become such a fractious place in a short number of years. Back when I started this blog in 2009, the world seemed like a fairly stable place. Yes, we’d had shallow Republicans as presidents before (the party began its slow collapse with Nixon), but we’d managed to weather the storm. A new danger reared its head in 2016 and one man has kept himself in headlines, whether in or out of office, ever since. A decade is long enough. Please make a plan for getting out to vote tomorrow. I’ll get back to my usual posts on books, movies, horror, and home-grown philosophy after this, a source of sanity in this world gone sideways. If there’s a country to come back to, I might crawl out from under my rock in a couple more years. But for the moment, please dust off your voting shoes and get to the polls tomorrow.
