Why I’m voting against Governor Mitt Romney

There’s been a video circling the Internet recently. It showed up on all of the talking heads and it’s been making the newspaper rounds. The thing is, when it finally got to me, I’m so sick of hearing former Governor Mitt Romney pretend to act like a normal human being that I just couldn’t care less any more. I don’t care that he’s rich, pompous or Mormon. I don’t care that his grandfather married multiple women and lived in northern Mexico. And I don’t care about his flip-flopping policies. I had already made up my mind not to vote for him. Why would I? He certainly doesn’t represent me or any of the policies I support (for the record, neither does Barack Obama).

But notice the difference here: I was not an undecided voter. Neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney represent my interests. I simply resigned myself to not voting for either of them. When telling people that voting was a pointless effort for me, they’d recoil in horror as I spat in the face of “our founding fathers” and “all the people that died so I had the right to vote.” Great.

The thing is, it’s my right to vote for who I want. And typically, I want to vote for a candidate who represents what America pretends to be about: freedom, equality, opportunity, etc. Mitt Romney doesn’t represent any of those qualities. If anything, he represents the exact opposite of those qualities.

Earlier, I mentioned the Internet videos that have been going around. Most sources cite the “47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what.” This statistic has its own issues. Romney lumps the elderly on social security (who typically do not vote for Obama), unemployed students, families with more than five children who make less than $50,000/year, and oh yeah, the families of soldiers, into this 47%.

But the problem I have with this video is exactly what Romney says this “47% of people” “believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it.”

I’m sorry Mitt Romney. Food is not a privilege. It’s a right. Housing and medicine are rights as well. Now, I know this gets into some constitutional muddy water (since the following are not a part of the Constitution) but an integral part of our American canon declares that as Americans, we believe in the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Life.

You might not be aware, Mr. Romney, that food is sort of crucial to the living process. Therefore, people who consider themselves “entitled to food” aren’t doing so out of a sort of smug self-satisfaction of being too lazy to work, so they hide all of their money in off-shore accounts to avoid work and insist on attending a $50,000 per plate fundraiser to get the man who will help them save more of their tax money elected President.

No. That’s for people like you. It takes a lot of balls to stand up there and claim that the starving people in our country are entitled to food. Yes, I believe everyone also deserves a decent place to live (if they want it, many homeless people don’t want somewhere to live, unfortunately, or can’t handle stable living) as well as medicine to stay healthy, but it’s the food that gets me.

Granted. I believe there is something significant to the old John Smith adage of, “He who cannot work, will not eat,” but the reality of the situation is that Mr. Romney declares that almost half of the country believes they are entitled to food and the government is nothing except a food stamp printer blind to who is actually receiving said food stamps. As for the audience at this $50,000 per plate fundraiser, they agree. It was their hard work and ingenuity, and business sense that enabled them to invest their thousands of dollars in the NYSE, and hide their millions of dollars in the Cayman’s. They CHOSE hard work and riches, as opposed to the nearly half of the country that CHOOSES poverty because the government will give them a Thanksgiving meal every single day of the year.

I wasn’t voting for anybody before. But Mitt Romney’s complete incompetence to understand the welfare system, America or humans for that matter, has convinced me to vote against him.