From where I stand

Election Time is upon us.
Races will be run, names will be sullied, mud will be flung, and the last man standing (yes, I strongly suspect it will be a man) will not necessarily be the best man for the job.
And why is that, I wonder.
Why, year after year, term after term, are voters faced with the feeling they are choosing what may be a lesser of two evils?
Quite simply, because we are a people divided.
We are a people divided by our own devices.
Politics and religions are devices we have created to fill needs and achieve ends.
These devices have, among other things both good and ill, brought about a situation that grieves and worries me: a voting body composed largely of exclusionary interest groups and single issue voters.
Let's be honest, we have a tacit two party system, and neither is currently all that different. Both are ponderous, BIG government entities that have strayed SO far from their core tenets that each is barely recognizable.

Faced with this, how should people vote? They turn to their churches, their families and their single issue concerns.

-2nd amendment rights (gun issues)
-Healthcare
-Religious protection (for/against, it's the same issue)
-Borders & Immigration
-The War in the Middle East
-Etc, Ad nauseam

These are all big issues and legitimate concerns, the problem, IMHO, is that when touting one folks tend to ignore the others.

These big political entities: GOP, Dems, the Catholic church, the Church of Christ (sorry church-goers the moment churches do anything stronger than urging their members to get to the polls and vote as their consciences dictate, they've become nothing more than political organizations interpreting the Bible the way politicians interpret the Constitution...to suite their own ends) anyway, these big political entities, and most of the little ones all use the same tactic: furthering their agenda by attacking another.

They force/trick their members into believing that civil liberties are mutually exclusive of each other. They are not. In fact, they are interdependent, and attacking one erodes them all.

Privacy, personal religious beliefs/practices, protection of loved ones, free speech and assembly...they are ALL crucial underpinnings to our great country. Please don't let these interest groups lead you to believe otherwise. So many are willing to compromise one, without realizing they are compromising them all. All of our people deserve all of these protections: all faiths, all colors, all the groups of law-abiding citizens, even those who forget that those fellow Americans on the other side of the argument are just that: fellow Americans, they all deserve the same rights.

So go out, do your own research, make up your own mind and find your own truths.
And please, pretty please: Vote.