Maybe it's 'cause it's election time. Maybe 'cause I've been dealing with crotchety old people.
Maybe I'm one myself.
Whatever the reason, I've decided my time's too short to debate people who think all parties and pols are the same, there's nothing can be changed and the only virtuous position is to sneer at everything.
I've had it with political nihilists.
I'm not even going to bother detailing the many real differences between the two major political parties in this country today. If you really can't see a hair between them, fine.
So why the hell are you always hanging around the political blogs? Why do you flood the comments sections of political stories? Why do you stuff my inbox and paper my Facebook page and comment on my videos if politics is meaningless? Are you that bloody lonely?
You may really believe this posture you strike. You may sincerely hold the credo that all pols serve the same masters, that we are powerless against the encroaching corporate overlords, that there's just no point to trying. If so, why in the name of Captains Bly and Crunch are you still hanging around using up my taxpayer-cleaned air, let alone pushing it at me in words of superior, supercilious hopelessness? If you insist on remaining on the planet, shouldn't you be busy building a cabin and planting heirloom seeds somewhere?
If resistance is futile, why do you keep harping? More importantly, if others' resistance if futile and you are ever so much wiser to eschew it, why do you spend so much time trying to discourage them? Don't you wish to remain their better? Surely there's not room on that exalted plateau for more than one?
Look, I don't think one party is perfect and the other the heart of evil. I'm not fucking twelve years old, for god's sake.
But neither am I twenty. I'm well past the nihilist hangover that followed the crash of my youthful ideals and have come to understand degrees, gradations and the endlessly varied palette that people call "gray."
And gray, my stylishly absolutist friends, is the new black.