I’ve filled out my ballot and will be turning it in post haste.

I’m working on a much longer essay about the election which will run after next Tuesday, but I thought I’d share a few immediate thoughts now that I have voted and my part in this election is over.

I really wanted to vote for Barack Obama. I like the message of reconciliation and acceptance that his election will represent.  I like the idea that an entire generation of young brown-skinned Americans will now know that they, too, can go grow up to be President. And I like the idea that this will open the door for young Hispanic, Asian and Arab Americans to have that same dream.  And I like the idea of this being the culmination of 40 years of civil rights struggles, and that many older people who have done the struggling have lived long enough to see their efforts pay off.

I also think he is infinitely smarter and far more capable than John McCain, and so I think there’s little doubt that he will win.

But in the end, Barack Obama, for all of his admirable personal strengths, sits at the top of a corrupt organization, and in this election season he has raised at least as much, if not more, money from giant corporations than John McCain has. The Economist puts it this way:

Darrell West, a vice-president of the Brookings Institution, a think tank, says that because many corporations anticipate a victory for Obama, they consider their gifts to Democrats an investment in their company’s future. Among the top contributors are sectors with special interests, including banks, telecoms companies and the healthcare industry.

Corporations were conspicuous at the Democratic convention, which boasted 141 business sponsors. According to the non-partisan Campaign Finance Institute, the Republican convention has announced only 91 sponsoring companies.

If Obama had been running as an independent candidate, then I would have had no problem voting for the guy.  But surely, with all of this corporate cash coming into the Democratic party this year, some kind of quid pro quo is going to take place at some point.  And as long as Americans continue to vote for corporate candidates like Barack Obama or John McCain, then what they will continue to get is a corporate-controlled government.  Change really is needed right now in America, but the personal change that Obama represents will take a back seat for the next four or eight years to what he and the other Democrats are going to have to do to help the corporations that helped them win.  In fact, we’re already seeing this in the Democratic support for the bank bailouts - the banking sector being among their highest donors this year.

Eight years ago, Republicans overwhelmingly voted for a guy they thought they liked personally, and we’ve all been paying the price for that egocentricity.  I’ve written a lot about how we make politics too personal, too much about personalities, and also too much about ourselves, and I think many Democrats are guilty of those things in this election.  We have to stop voting for people just because we think we might like them personally.  And we have to stop voting for people because we have been made to be afraid of their opponents.  The Daily Show did a brilliant segment on this last night, and I was reminded of how I, myself, voted for John Kerry in 2004 simply because I was so tired of hearing the phrase “President Bush.”

So I have opted to vote for an independent candidate in this Presidential election, someone who is known to be an egomaniac and a difficult person to work with, someone whose age is showing and someone who I know has no chance of winning.  But I am tired of throwing away my vote on people who are beholden to people and interests other than the best interests of the voters.  I am tired of throwing away my vote on people who pander to the lowest common denominator of our society.  And I am tired of Americans who are so vacuous and narcissistic that they respond favorably to such pandering.

Certainly no system of human governance will ever be perfect, and no candidate will ever be perfect.  And I’m not demanding perfection.  I’m simply asking for some idealism, some intelligence and some integrity.  I think Barack Obama may have all of those in spades, but his party does not.  Therefore, I’m not throwing my vote away on his corporate-controlled party.

Run as an independent, Mr. Obama, and I think you’d win handily.  Or at least, I’d vote for you.  But this year, I darkened the oval next to the name Nader.  Prove me wrong about you and your party in the next four years, and perhaps I’ll vote for you in 2012.

This has been a campaign season filled with personal insults and slurs.

The McCain/Palin supporters, for instance, keep calling Barack Obama a Muslim and a terrorist, and they like to call his mother an atheist, and they want to kill him, apparently.

And this is all well and good, as politics in America is personal and vituperative, and that’s just the way people seem to like it.

But now someone has finally crossed the line.

Republican gubernatorial candidate Roy Brown this week accused Democrats of spreading a false rumor that he is a vegetarian in this meat-loving state.

Call someone an atheist, or a terrorist, but please, if there is any semblance of dignity to be had in this election, for the love of Ra please do not call someone a vegetarian. At long last, have you no sense of decency?

The most frustrating thing about my minimal daily interaction with other human beings is that most of them seem very much far behind me. I don’t mean to say that I’m smarter than them, as there are many people in the world far smarter than me. No, I mean I tend to spend my time using my brain to imagine what will be, or what could be, while most people seem to me to spend their time fixated on what is happening right now, as if they are wearing blinders on their own imaginations.

Celebrity gossip, politicians’ personal lives, what sports team is winning this year, what song is everyone else listening to, what TV show is everyone watching; these are the things that seem to weigh heavily on most people’s minds. We are bombarded with constant advertising for things we will use or consume once and throw away, both in reality and mentally, and we waste perfectly good personal conversations talking about ephemera that will seem laughable and dated a decade from now.

We don’t seem to be able to learn that everything which is hip and now today will be old and square in the future; so that our obsession with Jay-Z today will one say seem as silly to us as our obsession with Menudo in the 1980s seems now. We can all look back and laugh at the silly things we obsessed about as our younger selves, but we don’t seem to be able to apply that lesson to our current selves.

And so our electoral politics is suffering, our economy is suffering, we are personally suffering with preventable health problems, and our ecosystem is suffering all because most people refuse to take the long view. The way we make and sell goods is destroying the planet because business leaders have been largely unwilling to consider or care about the future consequences of their current actions; people are suffering today from preventable diseases because they were unwilling to take the long view and change their habits in the past; and our economy is suffering in part because for too long making money has been all about pandering to where people are, instead of helping to advance people to where they ought to be.

Astronaut Frank Borman, when speaking of the Apollo 1 disaster that killed three astonauts on the launch pad in 1967, is credited with saying that the tragedy was a “failure of imagination.” No one at NASA imagined that something could go so horribly wrong on the ground, and so when it did they were caught completely unprepared.

We are suffering from a similar failure of imagination today. Imagination for the possibilities of the future, imagination for the possibilities of existence in this universe, wonder about the discoveries that lie ahead and when and where they will be made, and the drive to better ourselves because of the mere possibility of a future where everyone lives fulfilling lives, and where this is no war, no poverty, no petty turf squabbles.

We are hit over the head with a constant barrage of moralizing, yet one of the greatest moral duties we have is protecting our shared future, our shared unknown; and this is the one moral that goes largely unmentioned by those obsessed with abortion and gay marriage. Those moralizers have supplanted their own imaginations with moral strictures, and they inhabit very narrow minds where even to imagine certain things goes against their dogma. I actually feel sorry for those people; they have made religion, which is at its core a very imaginative thing, into something rigid and pedestrian. They have turned what could be an outlet for their imagination into a doctrine, and they have sacrificed the rather mysterious long view for the easy-to-understand, moralistic short view.

Our political season is almost - mercifully - at an end. Yet, we seem to be slogging through the bitterest and most divisive month we’ve had so far. There is much anger coming from the McCain/Palin side at their rallies, with people yelling and screaming and seeming to be very angry about something. We all say that we are tired of divisive politics, yet we are the ones who, in the end, perpetrate the division. We have gotten to a very bad point in our politics where we now think that every election is the most important one we’ve ever had. Yet, in the long view, each President has their place, each four or eight years has their own ups and downs, and life goes on regardless. The earth keeps on spinning, no matter who wins or loses.

Elections are important, don’t get me wrong. They are just not as important as making sure that life can continue into the future, or that people in the future have enough to eat and a place to sleep.

Our imaginations are constantly being suppressed by mindless entertainment and now-centric politics. This, not terrorism, not any other bogeyman, poses the gravest threat to humanity’s future. If we cannot imagine solutions to our problems, then they won’t be solved. If we cannot imagine a future where things are better than they are now, then it won’t happen. If we cannot take the long view, and look beyond this decade, and this election, and even our own lives, and make selfless and forward-thinking decisions in everything we do, then we do not deserve the feeling of superiority many of us wake up with every day.

Our future, and all of the hopes and aspirations of our species, lie not in this one election, or with one political party, and in fact not even in our own lifetimes; that’s the short view. Rather, our greatest hope lies solely in the long view of the road far ahead, just out of sight, where only our unfettered creativity and imagination can take us.

Check out this fun segment from Studio 360.

Yes, there was also conservative folk music in the 1960s.