I am a registered Independent in the state of Oregon.

I know that most people don’t willingly divulge their party affiliations without a fight, but I’m tired of not caring. I may identify more with Democratic views than I do with Republican, but not enough to feel like I should have to register as one. Our country was founded on independent spirit and, dammit, that’s what I’m going to be.  Besides, the principles that each party stands for are so muddled and incongruent from candidate to candidate and issue to issue that, to me at least, party affiliation seems inane and useless.

I’m sure someone will fire back with detailed breakdowns of what I’ve stated at different junctures and on different issues that prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt that I’m a Democrat or a Republican, but that’s all just hogwash. Thirty or forty years ago, Republicans were isolationists and fiscal conservatives. Now, a Republican president has gotten us into one preemptive war and is looking to get us into another while he runs the deficit to record-highs. Hell, Abe Lincoln was a Republican. Teddy Roosevelt was a Republican (before he was a member of the Bull Moose Party). Why, just a few years ago, Joe Lieberman was a Democrat. How crazy is that?

It’s easy to assume that, over the course of my lifetime, were I to pick a party and stick with it, that party’s platforms would change at least once or twice. But not so quick so as you’d notice. it takes years and years, as the party slowly bends to the will of it’s up-and-coming members. Just by watching history unfold over the past 15 years or so and by reading history books dealing with our nation, it’s easy to watch this happen in hindsight. Social perceptions change and parties are melded to society. No big surprise there.

So, in order to change with my own perception, since I often seem to be so out-of-step with society, and to appeal to my occasional swashbuckling sensibilities, I registered as an Independent. Not a Democrat, not a Republican, not a Libertarian, not a member of the Green Party, but a Independent. I’m free to cherry pick the platforms and issues from every party that I like and espouse them as my own, discarding the rest like chaff. This is just one of many ways in which I am like a combine. I also have a forward-mounted cab and a large hopper…but that’s beside the point.

To use another farm analogy, I don’t like to “mooo.”. I don’t like herd mentality. I don’t even like those little rope barricades they set up at the airport or the bank or Wendy’s to get you into a neat little line. My political beliefs do not conform to neat little orderly lines, so why should I conform to party lines? I’m leaving myself to open to graze, free to roam as I will.

I’ll go one step further and say that I don’t think you like to be herded into organized groups, either. If you really step back and look at it, being a part of a political party is like being in line at the DMV. Whether you’re in one line or in another, neither of them is likely to move any time soon, and even when you do get to the point where you can tell them what you need, you’re going to get the runaround and probably won’t be satisfied with the answer.

Oh yeah, and both of those lines end up at the same place, in the same building. Just another reason to be Independent.

To close, I’d like to quote our first, and arguably greatest President, George Washington. This quote was brought to my attention by someone else the last time I made this argument and I think it sums up my ideas on political affiliations perfectly:

“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty.”

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