Swing State Independent Undecided Voter Ask For Help

Middle Finger News Service 

op-ed by Willford J. Townson III

"I am a citizen living in a swing state, and I need to see more political advertisements before deciding who to vote for. Many of my state’s elections are toss-ups. For the last year, I have been advertised to every time I engage with media, front yards, billboards, bus stops, Tubi ad breaks, Tubi pause screens, Nextdoor posts,  podcasts, Facebook posts, Facebook Marketplace posts, radio stations, PTA brunches, car bumpers, car windows, and in-person conversations. 

I’m here to tell you that it’s still not enough. I can’t decide, and I require more guidance, please. My current senator is older than the audio cassette, so I should have a good sense of who to vote for, but I have rocks in my head and rocks don’t retain information. So I am asking: Please, someone advertise to me today, tomorrow, and the day after that. 

I would like someone at Apple to look into advertising in my Notes app. That bad boy never lets me forget to get trash bags or mayonnaise when I head to the store, so let’s get the senator and Election Day on the list. If someone could fill my mailbox with flyers about this candidate and her opponent, their decades of voting, their general political alignments and with information about why my life is good or bad and why it’s their fault or not.

I would love to see a political ad in this essay, before the next 

paragraph, if possible. The moments between this sentence and the next paragraph’s first sentence are crucial, and I, a total fool, could forget about the upcoming election. Without the upcoming election dominating every second of what I’m doing in my life, I won’t remember the election. I mean, we all keep a note by the door that says PANTS, or else we leave my house without pants on, right?   And the note inside the pants that says UNDERPANTS? Am I alone in this?  Only a relentless, unending torrent of election advertising will allow me to arrive at the polls with pants and underwear on whenever the election so happens to be.

Look, I like yards on their own, but I think it’s pretty crucial to have political campaign signs in yards up until the election. Remember, voters are basically tetras in a kid’s fish tank. If you forget to supply us with pellets of election guidance for even a few days, we may try and eat our weakest neighbor. And I wouldn’t mind an occasional reminder of the opaque double-negative ballot initiatives, but mostly I need to see NAMES. 

You see, I am not much more complex than a unicellular organism, like a protozoan or yeast. Think of my behavior as less decided and more dictated by the chemical reactions happening inside my membrane, determined by other chemicals present. Consider my origin a mystery, and my evolution hotly contested. But above all, consider me a fool.

Pour money into my state and strangle every aspect of the parts of life I use to acquire information to make choices. Ruin my television. Make Nextdoor only slightly more insane. There is no way for me to "vote" or “know who to vote for” without a high-pressure jet of political advertisement blasting away the detritus I call “regular life."