Would you please act like adults? Steranko, and every one else in this country is greater than the sum of their political opinion.

(cover by the Legendary Jim Steranko, just so you non-comic book readers know who is in question here)

Haven’t you people learned anything in the last year?  Has it not yet gotten through to you why we have the awful choices we have? Why nothing is getting better?

I’ll explain it to you, because we (YOU) automatically view anyone with a different opinion as wrong , as though you are the all wise Buddha, complete with all the knowledge of mankind between your ears, and that anyone who disagrees with you is disagreeing because they are a bad person and should be shunned.

That is beneath you.  And THIS time around it is absurd.  This election is a choice between- are you more bothered by a bad smell or nails scratching on a chalk board?  Reasonable people can disagree on with of these A-holes is the bigger A-hole.

We (YOU) cannot continue to shun your fellow man because they disagree politically.  I have been all over this country and met thousands of people.  Everywhere I went  99% of the people out there were NOT idiots or bad people, they just have a different perspective.  Often times they have perfectly reasonable arguments for what they think, even though I disagree.  I know this because I don’t shun them or assume I am all knowing and all seeing and I actually listen to what they have to say.  I learn something, and they learn something, and we find out we have more in common than not in common.

We (YOU) can start doing that and treating your fellow man with some respect, and we can all move forward, Or we (YOU) can keep behaving like this, so we are completely divided and angry at each other and the choices keep getting worse because no candidate has to rely on logic and results, but merely on placating to one side of things and getting those people to behave the most belligerently. 

This is asinine.  It is. 

See this…this is wrong…

This Ecker guy, even though he has respected Steranko for years, interacted with him personally and was treated by him with respect and so on…now shuns him, not because of anything he has actually done, but because of who he is going to vote for…that is not how adults should behave. That is not rational, and it puts more weight on a tweet than years of actual personal experience with the man. 

That is a perfect example of the childishness I have seen go on all over the place for 18 months as normally rational people get swept up in the emotion and fervor of the dog and pony show.  People from both sides. You know what side I’m on?  I’m on the side of free speech, and grown up discourse, and  people being able to voice their opinions without fear of being shunned…because occasionally over the course of history, people saying things we disagree with turned out to be pretty damn important, and I’m willing let a million people I disagree with speak and be wrong so that the occasional time I AM WRONG someone is there to tell me.

For every thing you find wrong with A-hole no.1 there is something someone else see wrong with A-hole no.2.  And the same goes for whatever good you can all manage to find in either A-hole.  This does not make either of you bad people.  It just makes you citizens trying to find some reason to vote.  Behaving like children and throwing tantrums, is what makes you bad people

( Steranko’s tweets are here, in case you were wondering…It sure looks to me like Jim has given this some thought, and…that’s what thinks…good for him, what do I care?  Who am I to define him as a person based on one days tweets about some politician being more awful than another politician?  To do so would say more about me than it would about him )

What does Steranko’s voting record have to do with him drawing Captain America?   I have no idea what Mike Mignolia or Rob Liefeld think, but I would rather buy a book drawn by Mignolia if I disagreed with every word he ever uttered, than one by Leifeld if I agreed with everything he ever said.  You are letting political opinion define every single facet of a person’s existence.  That is debilitatingly myopic.

Voting for A-hole no.1 or A-hole no.2, does not make you a bad person…doing bad things makes you a bad person.  You people are letting actual real life relationships, with people you heretofore had respected and gotten along with very well for many years, get ruined because of opinions you have on CANDIDATES NEITHER OF YOU HAVE NEVER MET, THE ONLY KNOWLEDGE YOU HAVE OF IS FILTERED THROUGH ONE BIASED NEWS SOURCE OR ANOTHER, WHO COULD HAVE BOTH BEEN LYING FOR THE ENTIRE 2 YEARS THIS HAS BEEN GOING ON.

…And three months from now when A-hole no.1 and A-hole no.2 have moved on to doing whatever the hell they are going to do…you will be sitting in a life that is now absent several people that used to bring some joy into it.

Stop it. We are not on team Democrat or team Republican…we are on team U.S. Citizen, and we have enough problems without kneecapping ourselves by stifling and shunning each other, ignoring and mocking each other, slamming the door on any discourse we don’t agree with…that leads to ignorance, and to ruin.

Someone is going to be the next president, that person will actually not have the power to ruin the lives of 300 million people…those 300 million people have that power…and I see them using it more and more.