Yes, it’s been a long, hot summer. Not just because of rising temperatures due to the planet’s axial tilt and an ongoing drought in the southeast- no, because it’s election year.

Now, normally I’m a pretty apolitical person. I vote for who I think will do the best job, rather than along any party lines. I’m conservative on some issues, liberal on others, and middle of the road most of the time. But this election year, the vote affected me quite personally- I work for a Sheriff’s Office, and my boss, the Sheriff of this county for 24 years, is retiring. This opens the field up quite a bit on who will be my boss- and direct my job- for the next four years. In the running for the Republican Primary were the current Chief Deputy, a man who’s run the Sheriff’s Office for the past four years, is a bar certified attorney, graduate of the FBI National Academy, and someone who’ve I known to be a very decent, honest person. He has his faults, but is widely believed to be the most experienced choice. On the other side of the ticket is a Sergeant in a local police department, who’s been in law enforcement for 10 years and is also a decent person; but who has never worked in a Sheriff’s Office (which is a whole different beast from a police department) and has some skewed ideas about how a Sheriff’s Office should function. In his favor is that he’s the home-town boy. Of course, as the campaign wore on, the local guy’s supporters got nastier and nastier. To his credit, he hasn’t done anything really dirty that anyone can point to, but his fans are another matter.

So, who wins the primary in July? The home town guy. In my mind, the voters of the county threw out the nastiness of the local guy’s supporters and the vast experience of the Chief Deputy just to vote in the local guy. What’s really annoying is the fact that many of those people who voted for the local guy called the Chief Deputy after the election and asked him to stay on as Chief Deputy- “because (local guy) is going to need a lot of experienced help”. Are you shitting me? Add on to this the fact that out of 65,000 people in the county, only 31,000 are registered to vote- and only 6700 of those bothered to vote at all. What’s the point? It starts to make me wonder why I bust my ass every day for these people when only 1/10th of them vote and those that do seem to have said “We don’t like how you do your job”. The same trend is towards voting in county commissioners whose only concern is stopping growth- not controlling or directing it, but stopping it altogether and taking the county back to a small, agrarian, rural area. Hmm. Good luck with that- the growth is coming whether they want it or not. We’re too close to Atlanta and on too many transportation arteries for it not to. By sticking our heads in the sand, it will grow uncontrollably and in directions that will cause many, many problems in the future. But no, let’s stop it altogether- as if that’s ever happened without destroying the community.

Yeah, it’s got me annoyed and grouchy, questioning the idiots in this county, and wondering if I should flip them all the bird and go work somewhere else.