The Illusion of Importance
I got this month’s issue of Nintendo Power in the mail today, and I was excited to see that Nintendo is expanding the line of classics for the Game Boy Advance. I’ll be picking up both Castlevania and Zelda 2 nearly immediately, and I’ve already been lusting after Square Enix’s remakes of Final Fantasy 1 and 2, which has been scheduled for a November release. Particularly satisfying is the fact that nearly all of the games being released this time were games that I selected when asked by Nintendo to participate in a survey. I understand that I was just one participant that happened to be in the statistical majority, but the illusion that my opinion matters thrills me to no end.
That probably explains why I was so thrilled to find that my voter’s registration card had arrived by mail when we limped into Gainesville on Saturday night. After eight years of living in Gainesville and seven years of living in Gainesville for twelve months of the year, I finally got around to switching my voter’s registration to Alachua County. Rather than driving a 150-mile round trip to go vote, I can instead walk down the street. I’m amazed by the convenience of it all because I’m used to having to make an epic quest to go “throw my vote away” on a third-party candidate.
For what it’s worth, I also officially defected from the Republican party and became a Libertarian. If the Republican party were truly the party of the moderates they trotted out during the convention, then I might actually belong there. Right now, though, the current crew seems hell bent on increasing the size of government and getting further involved in telling people how to run their lives—essentially my polar opposite.