I often hear people repeat the old cliché “I don’t vote for the party, I vote for the person.”

This year is no time to think that way. In recent years, Republican ideology has put this country in the ditch. We have been abusing our Armed Forces personnel, making new enemies around the world, running up unfathomable amounts of public debt, and driving our society apart with politics of fear and division along lines of class, race, and religion.

We keep a million people behind bars while we attract desperate foreigners in to take jobs “that Americans won’t do.”

The past decades have seen our manufacturing economy disappear as the system is restructured to sell off anything for the fastest buck.

The farm economy too has been destroyed in favor of the multi-national monopolistic business model that has left our very food supply susceptible to toxins, tampering, adulteration, and of course, interruption.

The very air and water that we depend on have been degraded so as to be a threat to health, but also made scarce, so to become a fungible commodity, for those with the means to exploit it.

Our society, our culture, our country has sustained grievous damage in recent years. It’s time that we turn this mess around. As Hillary Clinton recently put it, “sending Republicans to clean up Washington is like expecting the iceberg to save the Titanic.”