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Hold your nose, pull the lever and cast your vote!
Diaries of an expendable voter...

As a kid growing up, I certainly had my share of greens. Growing up, there always seemed to be this huge pro-veggie movement and in light of my parents creativity in marketing the many benefits of going green on the diet, children are intrinsically wired to loathe every ounce of leaf that touches their dinnertime palette. Consider more the many myths surrounding the world of vegetables; the lies about vegetables that continually get passed down from generation to generation like that Christmastime fruit cake that no one seems to want to eat. My mother advertised them as a key to overwhelming prosperity (maybe that's where I went wrong). My grandmother invoked fear as she boldly suggested that a lack of carrots in my diet would inevitably lead to blindness (I do wear glasses). Then of course, one was not allowed to forget the inseparable relationship between spinach and immeasurable strength because of the early Saturday morning rendezvous with Popeye on the tube. Through much testing, I have concluded that an increase spinach intake does NOT in fact result in steroid-like growth of the biceps as Popeye has successfully misled the prepubescent Gen X'ers to believe.

What I find most ironic in their ploy to more or less force me in to going green was in the systematic means that they used to progress me from the soft stuff to the much less desirable but more beneficial hard stuff. Means that more closely resembled a crack deal of sorts from "New Jack City" than a cheesy song and dance from "VeggieTales". In the beginning, they first introduced me to the gateway greens - the easy stuff like green beans, broccoli, lima beans and peas. Among others, this was the stuff that my mother used to unsuccessfully convince me that going green on the diet wasn't all that bad. "You better eat your broccoli, it tastes soooo good and is good for you too," almost as if she was more or less trying to convince herself. On occasion, a dab of butter and a few teaspoons of sugar were used in vain, an attempt to mask the detestable taste of unseasoned nutrition. After a slow phase-in period, the mythical man saw it necessary to progress me to the hard stuff. Serious greens like artichokes, asparagus, spinach and cauliflower (an albino green); as if anything containing the word "choke" should ever have a place in one's diet. This hard stuff was serious business and should never be

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