So, my name is Matt Bell and I am undergaduately an historian, which is to say the inclination for the specialization which so typically accompanies academic refinement failed to encourage an abandonment of the broad. I attended college to reinforce a desire for story-telling, but halfway through nearly abandoned my natural charge for a major redirection toward ecology. Thankfully a couple very special professors seized me from the clutches of perpetual evolutionary speculation with the understanding that to study history is actually to study everything . . . to study anything; and the ability to relate that information to others is priceless. Now, who the hell would want to refine that?!
I’m from, and live in now, Augusta, GA, where science is fake—despite our town being a perceptibly thriving medical community—and a terribly-obvious allegiance to nonsense runs rampant. I went to grade school here. When I was born, my family possessed discernable wealth, but a post-divorce reality saw my family absent a father while my mother faced all the throes of desolation that an uneducated single mother in America can look forward to. We shortly thereafter relocated to a crappy apartment. My family was on welfare, had free school lunches, were covered by state health insurance, while my mom went back to college, earned a degree in the medical field, and has been working at a hospital for two decades. She has done well and is certainly a testament to the American dream.
I fear now, however, that the potential for so rapid a clambering from situational tribulation is minimizing before our eyes. An entire generation is now shackled by propagated educational necessity, and it can hardly be escaped from. Citizens can seldom afford a regular hospital check-up and to even consider one often requires an allegiance to an occupational overlord paying scant wages to collect the necessary insurance the doctor requires. For those of us covered by the Affordable Care Act and/or with pre-existing conditions, the current Administration has battled tirelessly to eliminate our coverage, despite the demonstrably false assertion of the opposite.
The American Presidential election of 2016 was certainly startling, but having barely participated in contemporary American politics, I was still a profoundly idealistic Liberal Arts graduate entertaining protestuous participation. In high school I was a “Young Libertarian,” enthralled by Ayn Rand’s Anthem and Stoicism; only to then become a neo-conservative know-it-all; a cynical communistic contortion found me shortly thereafter before I settled into an apathetic anarchy which flowered into nihilistic frivolity; all the while never abandoning a patriotic allegiance, if not an ideological devotion, to Franklin, Jefferson, and Paine . . .. but surprisingly, during this era, never voting! In retrospect, such an idealistically malleable individual might aught not to vote anyway perhaps; although, should all our citizenry read the likes of Aurelius and Rand; Hitchens and . . . well, Hitchens; Darwin and Marx; Engels and Kropotkin; Foucault, and Montaigne; then things might be a little more agreeable.
Voting for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 GA primary at the age of 28 was the first time I ever voted. I had long since graduated college and long since abandoned the iconoclastic, clarion-calling literature of my youth in all its glorious flavors. I just wanted the American citizenry to do well . . . but we got Hilary—an aristocratic, familially-encouraged, pseudo-monarchical elitist . . . so I voted for Jill Stein for her support of Universal Healthcare, Scientific appreciation and comprehension, less-interventionist foreign policy approach, and democratic avocation for ranked-choice voting.
Jill Stein did not win the 2016 American presidential election and ranked-choice voting is not a thing. Now, in 2020, having experienced this disaster of an Administration for four years, I will not so easily toss away my vote. I have become something of a political junkie, and I weep for the individuals who avoid political discourse and practice the way I did for a decade. But who knows what will happen this year . . . hopefully we’re not fucked.
