It’s primary night, and I’m not voting. This is for a whole variety of reasons, including there not being one meaningful race in my district where my vote will sway the outcome in any way.

But one reason is as follows below: What follows here is a commentary on the whole of politics in this season and several in recent memory at all levels, all the way from president on down to dog catcher.

I am tired of both ends of the political spectrum being afraid of the middle and being terrified of the word compromise, let alone the concept. I am very disheartened by the fact that both liberals and conservatives these days dig their heels in and hold to a belief simply because it’s what they believe and don’t offer any substantiation to help convince the other side to work with them and meet in the middle.

I hate the religious right and the union liberals and the old line conservatives and the blue dog democrats and the tea partiers and all such named groups because they stand for nothing beyond their own ideals and wrap themselves in what they refer to as patriotism in order to deflect arguments that truthfully claim that they are all have extremely self-service goals.

I am angered by the fact that for at least a decade, the country has not moved in any positive direction economically, socially, and politically and has completely failed to provide any kind of substantive leadership to the rest of the world. This lies entirely in the hands of both political parties who fail to truly do what’s good for the entire nation and not just their interest groups and spend endless amounts of time yelling past each other with less and less actual idea sharing and more and more rhetoric and personal attacks.

Both sides are now led and made up of a cavalcade of idiots who seem to value nothing more than the sound of their own voices on the news and the sight of their election and PAC account balances growing.

During deeply trying times in this nation, our government has managed to come together and form a truly meaningful coalition that has repeatedly found compromise in the face of deep anger, divide and mistrust and has actually acted in the best interest of all people in this nation. We have faced a difficult set of challenges for over a decade now and nothing has been done, either due to inaction by one side or another, or by one side ignoring the protests of the other and passing legislation that serves little purpose than to polarize the country’s discourse.

The truth is that both sides are to blame for the fact that this country, supposedly the greatest nation on Earth:

Has far too many people out of work who want to work,

Has a growing divide in status and power and standard of living between the wealthy and the poor,

Has too many people going hungry and homeless every day when there is an abundance of shelter and food,

Has corporations who are more concerned about making their shareholders happy than their customers or employees,

Pays too little in taxes and expects too much from their government,

Worships athletes and actors and socialites as heroes while there are members of the military at war in other parts of the world, policemen defending us, and firefighters protecting and rescuing us, and religious and social organizations and individuals working to actually do good in the world with extremely limited resources,

Has long arguments over how to fund schools and teachers and whether to fund schools and teachers at certain levels to educate our children while having relatively little trouble coming up with money to build $1 billion stadiums,

Can gather in pride around a technical achievement like landing a car-sized rover on Mars, but can’t see or create value in funding more manned missions into space,

Has a population that agrees sacrifices need to be made, but doesn’t want to make sacrifices themselves,

And wants to actually prevent groups of people from being able to do the same thing that everyone else is able to do.

Everyone sees the foundation of our society crumbling beneath their feet. But is anyone actually willing to do the work and make the sacrifices necessary to fix the problems?

I wish I could answer that positively.

See you tomorrow.