Politics and Despair<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"I hate this election season. I hate hearing about the debates. I hate reading posts that have anything to do with politics. I hate reading status updates\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/barefootandpregnant\/2012\/10\/politics-and-despair.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Politics and Despair\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I hate this election season. I hate hearing about the debates. I hate reading posts that have anything to do with politics. I hate reading status updates\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/barefootandpregnant\/2012\/10\/politics-and-despair.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Barefoot and Pregnant\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2012-10-17T16:39:45+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2017-03-09T22:10:32+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/wp.patheos.com.s3.amazonaws.com\/blogs\/barefootandpregnant\/files\/2012\/10\/romney-laundry.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Calah Alexander\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Calah Alexander\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"4 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/barefootandpregnant\/2012\/10\/politics-and-despair.html\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/barefootandpregnant\/2012\/10\/politics-and-despair.html\",\"name\":\"Politics and Despair\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/barefootandpregnant\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2012-10-17T16:39:45+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2017-03-09T22:10:32+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/barefootandpregnant\/#\/schema\/person\/cbd5af11d9f73881b801bf2e07eb8757\"},\"description\":\"I hate this election season. 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{"id":891,"date":"2012-10-17T12:39:45","date_gmt":"2012-10-17T16:39:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/barefootandpregnant\/?p=891"},"modified":"2017-03-09T17:10:32","modified_gmt":"2017-03-09T22:10:32","slug":"politics-and-despair","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/barefootandpregnant\/2012\/10\/politics-and-despair.html","title":{"rendered":"Politics and Despair"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

No hope. Not any\u2026or at least, very little. If Obama gets re-elected, it\u2019s likely that my husband will lose his job when Ave Maria shuts down because of the HHS mandate. Even if the university manages to survive and the Ogre manages to keep his job, our health insurance premiums will skyrocket, and we\u2019re barely scraping by as it is. We\u2019ve got piles of unpaid medical bills. A premium hike would drown us.<\/p>\n

If Romney gets elected, I have only the very slightest bit of hope that he\u2019ll overturn the HHS mandate. I don\u2019t believe Obamacare will be overturned, which it ought to be. We need real health care reform, not a crappy, hastily-cobbled-together-monster that serves political special interest groups far more than the actual people of America. I don\u2019t have much confidence that Romney will do anything to slow the tide of abortions. At best, he might be able to keep our limping economy from totally self-destructing\u2026maybe.<\/p>\n

The saddest part is that I really want to like Romney. Honest, I do. I saw this picture and wanted to like it, wanted to share it, wanted to feel happy about the Romneys.<\/p>\n

$\"\"$ <\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

I wanted to believe that they are who they say they are. But that was shouted down by a louder voice, who wryly observed that it was probably a political stunt to capture the affection of \u201ceveryday Americans\u201d who have to do such pedestrian things as laundry.<\/p>\n

I like Paul Ryan. I want to like him a lot more than I do, but crap like this makes me wary<\/a>. A person is a person, no matter how they\u2019re conceived. Ryan knows that. So it scares me that he would change his tune in an intense political moment. I don\u2019t want to watch Ryan become the next Stupak<\/a>, the next Nelson<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I hate that I\u2019ve become so cynical. I wish I wasn\u2019t. I wish I could be confident and have faith that people in politics can stand for something and can hold to their principles. But I don\u2019t anymore. I\u2019m tired of watching men and women in positions of power abandon their consciences, or at least what appeared to be their consciences, to curry favor and gain votes. I\u2019m starting to see the average American\u2019s nastiness over politics as a side-effect of the moral decay of politicians themselves. It\u2019s not just the right; Obama made lots of promises that appealed to liberal morality (closing Guantanamo<\/a>, anyone?) with no follow-through. He promised radical reform, particularly in the areas of health care and the environment, and the only thing he\u2019s delivered is an unwieldy nightmare of a law that no one has read and that was man-handled through Congress with shady backroom deals, bribes, and threats. He promised a \u201cnew era of non-partisan politics\u201d and then spent the next four years blaming the GOP when anything didn\u2019t go his way. I didn\u2019t vote for Obama in 2008 because I didn\u2019t agree with his politics, but I wasn\u2019t crushed when he was elected. He seemed like a well-intentioned, if misguided, person. He seemed competent.\u00a0 He seemed essentially decent. Now, he seems like a petulant, nasty child who doesn\u2019t care what happens to anyone else as long as he gets his way.<\/p>\n

When this is the caliber of the people we are forced to choose between, no wonder everyone gets upset. No wonder people get nasty. No wonder people choose to put on blinders and insist that one candidate is blameless and the other is evil incarnate. It\u2019s a lot more attractive than the reality.<\/p>\n

But I\u2019m pretty sure my despair over the political situation of our country isn\u2019t much better than willful ignorance. So my question to you, readers, is this: how do you acknowledge political realities and view candidates objectively without feeling as if it\u2019s all hopeless? How do you bounce back from a Stupak, or if you\u2019re liberal, how do you bounce back from an Obama? (Or if you\u2019re liberal and you think Obama\u2019s done a good job, insert two-faced politician of your choice here.) How do you keep going, keep hoping, and keep having faith that we can be better than we are when every politician in Washington seems hell-bent on proving you wrong?<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"