True patriots or squawking cheerleaders?

By James Swift
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Staff Writer

Darfur. Angola. The parking lot post Raiders loss. These are some of the most contentious spots on the globe, yet those bastions of ideological flare-ups are but a pale inconvenience compared to the ensuing battle that is the American college campus during election season.

Every four years, not-so-world weary idealists put on the colors of their favorite clubhouse and run around preaching their ill-researched respective rhetoric while declaring jihad on those devious individuals fostering antithetical viewpoints.

Suddenly, EVERYBODY becomes a political scientist. The same guy that drinks brown stuff out of a Sprite bottle in class suddenly possesses the analytical know how to gauge which political affiliation is best suited to handle global economic treatises.

Essentially, all this is a glorified game of red shirts vs. blue shirts, with a healthy dose of dangerous, hyperbolic misunderstanding thrown in for good measure. One side wants Jesus in science class, and the other side wants to give American abortions to the Mexicans.

There is no in-between. Either you are a racist Bible thumper that wants Neal Boortz as Secretary of the Treasury or you're a God-hating commie sympathizer that eats American flags. All of this begs the question: do you even know what it is that you choose to believe?

It really doesn't matter which tree house you swear allegiance to: whether you took the oath of the donkey or the elephant, your party still isn't as large as the TRUE number one political association in America: The United Non- Voter Liberation Front.

Each year, millions of truly patriotic Americans DO NOT exercise their civic responsibility to vote. Really, who needs democracy? It's just a bunch of squawking cheerleaders brainlessly demonizing one another.

If you ever wondered why voting figures are so low, try taking a look into the mirror.