Donut Hole Party

Politically, I am lost in the donut hole.  Not the infamous Medicare coverage gap referred to as the donut hole, but the political party one.  I am one of the most under represented people in American politics.  I am adrift.  And I am not alone.

I never felt this way so strongly before.  Maybe I should have.  Maybe I was too naive to realize that I was never represented.  Maybe most people are never truly represented.  Or maybe, just maybe, the parties I have been aligned with over the years have changed, and the gap between my beliefs and the party platforms has widened.

I started my voting life, some 40 odd years ago, as a Republican, mainly because my mother was an irrational liberal and was always railing on the Republicans.  My sister and father followed her lead, leaving me with Alex P. Keaton as my sole political role model.  I was the only one in my peer group who voted for Ford, not because I like cars but because I liked Ford.  For decades I voted Libertarian, mainly because they were the most aligned with my apparently misguided belief in personal responsibility.  But I could not ascribe completely to their minimalist government platform.  Over the past decade or so I have had to swallow my rational economic roots and my aforementioned misguided belief in personal responsibility and vote Democratic, mainly because I strongly believe in human rights.  Having said that, every time I hear a Democrat speak I want to throw things at them.

Feeling frustrated I went in search of other parties and platforms that represented me.  Despite scouring the web and reading many, many party platforms, I remained frustrated because all of the platforms I read were flawed in one way or another.  A couple of parties, namely the world not so famous Unity Party of America and the Objectivist Party, came close but not close enough, and besides they are so obscure that there would be no value in aligning with them.  As my frustration mounted, I actually read the Peace and Freedom Party platform, which shockingly I felt really good about until I got to the part about the socialist run economy, which is a non-starter for me.

My problem is that I am not easy to categorize.  I am neither fish nor fowl.  Most would label me a centrist, as on average I do not lean too far left or too far right.  But am I a centrist?  No way.  That is way too simple of an explanation.  In general using an average to analyze a population is fraught with risk.  Simply put, “On average every one in the world has one boob and one ball.”  Obviously, not many of us are built that way.  Depending on the issue, my leanings can be liberal or conservative.  So much so, that I have been labeled everything from bleeding heart to heartless.

So where does that leave me?  Somewhere down the donut hole.  Maybe you are there with me.  If so, let’s have a party.