Day 19: Thinking about the next election

One of the purposes of writing down your thoughts is to find out what you're thinking. Writing it down is close kin to figuring it out. A thought that remains unexpressed (or not well expressed) is not wholly understood. Its connections and consequences, its place in the "big picture," remains unrevealed or misunderstood. Perhaps not everybody has to "spell it out" for themselves in writing. Perhaps they can pursue a thought, develop it, understand its place in a grander scheme, all without the aid of a writer's tools. That's not me though.

Not that writing it down inevitably leads to enlightenment. One can write it out and yet continue in one's own ignorance of all the implications, of the very truth or untruth of what one has written. Writing your thoughts does not guarantee that your thoughts will be improved by the process, or that they will be valuable to yourself or anyone else because they are accord with what is.

In other words, one can write out one ignorance, or one can even actively deceive by means of the written word. So writing a thought down does not make it a true thought, but if one is pursuing the truth, it might help to write it down and follow where it leads.

I write all this, which may seem utterly obvious to the reader, to justify myself in writing about politics now and then on this blog. In some ways, I'd rather avoid it, but I do need to figure out what I think on various subjects, not the least of which is who I should vote for (if anyone) in the coming election.

As a starting point, let me just say that I'm not sure. I'm undecided. The choice is between the Republican candidate, the Democratic candidate, some third party candidate, or nobody at all. In recent elections, I've tended to vote for nobody. In the last election, I was a Republican Never-Trumper and after his nomination at the Republican convention, I even disenrolled from the Republican Party.

But here we are three years later, with a political process that seems to have devolved into bitterness and invective. I spoke of this a while back in a post entitled The Politics of Vituperation. Though I was a Never Trumper last time, this time, though I dislike the president as much as ever, I am considering voting for the man. Given all my criticism of him over the past few years, that will be more or less shocking to many who know me.

Okay, there I've said it. The thought has been written down, and now I will have to see where it leads. I find I've gone on long enough for one post, so I'm going to leave it that. I might, just maybe, vote for Donald Trump!

I'll spell out the pros and cons in a future post. The choice I am facing is between Trump, a third-party candidate, or nobody, for the Democrats, it seems to me, have gone quite mad. I will spell out what I think about this in future posts, but for now, take a look at this: Wokeness Driving Gay Southern Liberal Trumpward. I'm like that fellow, someone who you would never expect to vote for Trump, so his reasoning is very interesting to me.

More on all this in coming posts.