Election Hopelessness

I woke up this morning with very low hopes for the future. This is a result of a full years worth of bad judgement as far as men are concerned, dissatisfaction with my job and my impact in the world and the upcoming election. Let's discuss the election.

I've been very frustrated and upset along with I think most of the rest of the country with the focus of the campaigns for this election. In my (albeit biased) opinion, Obama has been forced to spend a lot of his time fighting smears and the result has been the deterioration of focus on both sides of the real issues. Long story short, I spent 3 hours discussing the election with 2 different conservatives, with whom I really tried to put the whole character defect thing aside and discuss the real issues. I was convinced that if we could just put all the accusations aside we could probably come to an agreement about the things that really mattered: What to do about healthcare, what to do about the economy, etc. Maybe not perfect solutions but something that could be agreed upon. Unfortunately after raking my way through the sea of garbage and looking at the real heart of the matter, I began realising this might not be possible. To them, the left is too close to socialism, which is in their opinion a fails. To me, I see the values of capitalism but I also see it's undeniable faults and resulting failures. Neither system is perfect and the ideal answer seems to be evading us. Is progress important? Do we stick to capitalism because it is a the best of a bunch of bad ideas? Do we go towards socialism because competition and greed are ruining us? (btw, I wrote towards socialism not TO socialism). Or do we look for the answer that we don't yet have? Is there any way that we can all compromise? Unfortunately the overwheliming feeling I am getting is that it would take rebuilding from a civil war to do so. Until then, we will continue to argue about which imperfect system we chose to support. And that's if we can even get past all of this character bashing.