I am so glad that the election campaign in Virginia is over. Virginia has always been know for its ugly, negative election campaigns but this year's was the worst that I've seen since moving to the state in 1986.
When will Virginia politicians learn that what I want to know is what their goals are and how they propose to achieve them? I don't need to be reminded constantly that their opponent is a crook; I already know that. I got more benefit from a 10-minute conversation that I had with a candidate for the school board from my district than I did from all of the crap in my mailbox.
I got sick and tired of having my mailbox jammed with flyers that told me absolutely nothing about why I should vote for the candidate. They went right into the trash can. But at least the flyers put some money into the postal service's coffers.
What really touched my hot button was the incessant number of phone calls. The people who program these robocalls have figured out how to get around call blocking. To make matters even worse, they've figured out how to wait for my answering message to complete before delivering their unwanted messages to my voice mail, taking up storage capacity and wasting my time when I go to play them back.
We need a way to opt out of these phone calls just as we can opt out of marketing messages by registering for the Federal Trade Commission's Do Not Call list.
To add insult to injury, this year's crop of candidates was so weak that I didn't care who won. The only reason that I bothered to vote was this: Going back to the Revolutionary War, hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens have given their lives, and millions have been maimed for life, so that I can take half an hour and walk four blocks to my polling place in order to vote. I owe it to them to vote--no excuses.
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