I frequent few places more than my local Whataburger. As a poor college student with a culinary history that involves little more than ham sandwiches and microwaveable macaroni and cheese, it only makes sense for me to stop in and eat at one of the few fast-food restaurants that I enjoy five to ten times a week. (This guy is my inspiration.) But in spite of having been a regular for years, I looked up at the menu during lunch time today and realized I have yet to eat all of the offered items. (In fact, I realized today that Whataburger serves tacos!) When it comes time to order, I consider only my two favorite menu items, and through deep, painful deliberation, I choose between one of the two and end up wishing I chose the other...and somehow have missed out on the tacos my whole life. Today, I broke out of that mold and enjoyed a delicious taco, but not before I came to the realization that you and I have been missing out on much more than just tacos.

By walking into Whataburger under the self-made impression that I had only two quality options for lunch, I exemplified a logical fallacy known as the "false dilemma," an instance in which a falsely reduced number of options or solutions are taken into account of a situation. Advertisement and entertainment utilize this fallacy more than most of us realize, and in American society, we have come to adopt the false dilemma as an integral part of our thinking. On a small scale, oversimplification can be useful when doing things like deciding where to eat or shop in a city with hundreds of choices. But our tendency to reduce our options has blinded us to issues that have massive implications. There may be no better example of this fact than today's American political parties.

The Republican and Democratic parties nominated the two most disliked candidates in polling history, respectively, for the upcoming presidential election, but, as usual, it is highly likely that the major parties will together win every state and that one of the major party candidates will again win the election. How did we get to this point? Why are we almost certainly going to elect a president that the majority of the country is dissatisfied with? The answer has nothing to do with our current presidential candidates, and everything to do with the blindness with which Americans have conformed their personal ideologies to the political parties by way of the false dilemma. Rather than a diverse, truth-seeking electorate, we have an electorate primarily concerned with continuing one of two party names, believing it to be in their own best personal interests.

Society generalizes most ideas and people as either "conservative" or "liberal." But a good, hard look at both conservative and liberal ideas shows that there is often no true line of logic that makes one viewpoint conservative or liberal. For instance, Republicans often tell conservative voters that they want the government to stay out of their lives, but often favor stronger government regulations concerning personal morality, as with abortion. While liberal ideas, such as gun-control and the legalization of marijuana for recreational use in historically blue states, often have no necessarily "liberal" connecting logic. But in the same way that I never wandered outside of my favorite Whataburger choices, most of us do not search for political options beyond what we have always known and heard. We settle to believe what we would rather not believe because we see no other option than the two presented to us — in spite of the fact that there are no limitations on what you can believe.

In trying to solve the issues created by the two party system, a number of Americans will vote for Gary Johnson for President this fall. If you feel led to vote for Governor Johnson, I encourage you to do so! But I haven't written all of this to endorse any particular candidate or party, or even to focus on the purely on the upcoming election, as that would defeat the purpose. I want to remind you that the issue at hand looms much larger than the election. I am encouraging you to think with a thoughtful and searching mind. I want you to challenge yourself on the views you have held the longest, and not just political ones — I want you to try Whataburger tacos. The more we stretch ourselves and realize how many choices there are in life, the more we know how to do things like vote. We become better people when we look for the truth, knowing that it's there if you look for it. Refuse to settle for anything you can't believe in.