Election 2005
I was the first person in my district to vote!
I got there as they were setting up. They didn’t have anything out, nor did they even have the polling machine on yet. So I waited, and then I voted. I said no to Prop 1, yes to Prop 2, and pretty much voted the Independent line. Except for mayor – I voted the Green Party. It was the only position they sponsored, and it was the only place Judy Einach was listed.
She was all the way down on the bottom, which sucks because most people are probably going to look and only see Brown and Helfer, both of whom are part of the problem in Buffalo and Erie County. Brown was on the City Council and the State Assembly. Helfer was a right-hand man for Giambra. Watching their ads attacking each other convinced me that there was no way in hell that I was going to vote for either of them. And listening to the debates, most of what the candidates were saying was all the same – open up the waterfront, redevelop neighborhoods, fix the schools, open Main Street downtown, blah, blah, blah.
The only one that was really different was Einach. She’s the only one with the balls (ironically, the only female too!) to say that a casino is bad for Buffalo. And she’s right. Casinos pander to the poor with a pipe dream. They cause the cost of social services to skyrocket. They increase bankruptcies, divorces, suicide rates, alcoholism and drug addiction. Why not be honest, have a poor tax and give it to the Senecas? That’d be more realistic, because it would be truthful. Casinos take money from those that need it and give it to those that don’t need it.
This is not to say that the Senecas don’t need money, or that Native Americans don’t deserve reparations for what Europeans did to them. The casinos are owned by a few people, and will only benefit those people. The vast majority of the Seneca Nation will receive no benefit from the casinos. But I digress. Einach is opposed to casinos, and so I support her.
Another reason why I support her is because she was not in office when these morons fucked up the city’s and the county’s finances. She was not a direct part of the problem. But when a problem needs fixing, you don’t put someone in office that is part of the problem or helped create it. You get someone else in there to clean up their mess. So, unless a lot of other people are as persistant as I was looking for her name, more idiots are going to be elected.
Which is too bad, because this city does not need more of the same old same old. We need serious change, we need fiscal responsibility, we need to take care of the city, make it atttractive and grow it so that it isn’t a disappearing city anymore; a joke and armpit of the country.
