Don’t you hate it when you have a bunch of stuff written in an HTML form, and then the browser fails for whatever reason and you lose it all? Not that this has happened to me…
Saturday was the caucuses for Washington State, and a few thoughts spring to mind.
First, I did not vote. I’ll get to why that is in a minute, but what I’m always amazed by is how disempowered I feel in the national elections. Generally, for senate, house and presidential elections, I’ve lived in places that are overwhelmingly in one direction, be they for or against me. So much so, that I never feel like I have any reason to get out there and vote. This seems to be exacerbated by the recent electoral redistricting, in an incredibly interesting article in The New Yorker. But on the other hand, I read a piece some time ago about the EMpowerment offered by the Electoral College generally. Something along the lines of by living in a smaller state, your votes actually count for more through the Electoral College. Well, I guess that’s a good thing, but it’s a pity I’ve never lived in a small state. I always am so amazed and touched by the pictures of people lining up to vote in elections for the first time, but it never seems to come home for me. This is not to say you can’t make a difference on the local level, but the national levels are another ball game (although, on the local level, I never seem to be able to learn enough about a given issue by the election to make a satisfactory decision; and I’d rather make no decision than an ill informed one.)
Second, I basically don’t care much about the government, except for a couple of key issues. Primarily, I never fail to be amazed at how shortsighted politicians seem to be on big issues. The two big ones are usually the environment and help for the poor, but, most recently, the deficit seems to be taking the lead here. For the environment, basically I think that there’s a sense of it’s worked for this long, it’ll keep working. While that may be true, I doubt that we really want to take a risk with the human population. I mean, there’s almost no chance we could do something that would wipe out all humans, but would we feel comfortable if we wiped out a billion due to mass starvation? We probably would as long as they were not in my backyard. See previous postings re: Dave being a cynic. On help for the poor, it’s basically the exact same thing, except instead of putting money into schools and programs designed to get people other avenues of work, we put money into prisons. I bet $1 spent up front would save us $10 on the back end. The deficit is a whole other issue… I think that it’s roughly around 25% of the tax income to the U.S. government goes to servicing the debt. If we were really concerned about finding a way to get more money for the war, for jobs, for tax breaks etc, shouldn’t we try and mine this down a bit? Again, this is a complete economic novice speaking here, but just reducing deficit should help, shouldn’t it?
Third, and finally, I think I’ve been at odds with this president’s decisions almost as much as any elected official since David Duke. I don’t think he’s a bad guy; he’s just doing what he sees are the best things for the country. Really! People are generally not that evil, especially when working in positions in which they get so much feedback. I’m absolutely sure he thought that what he was doing at any time was probably best for the country. While you may or may not agree, this view tends to give you a much better feeling for what people are doing at any given time.
That said, I’ve probably been as opposed to this president’s policies in on a number of things as any president I can remember (not that I can remember that many). But in the grand scheme of things, it’s not the end of the world; I can keep on living and, though things aren’t ideal, we get another election right now to boot him out. The interesting thing for me is that we couldn’t have identified ANY of these behaviors during the last election cycle. He said what he was going to say, and he got elected. Generally, I just think that there is virtually no correlation between what someone says during an election cycle and what they do in office. This is not news. But what I find to be pretty interesting is that even though I disagree a whole bunch about the policies, it really just hasn’t affected me THAT much. That’s not to say the men and women who have died in Iraq should have died, but who’s to say there wouldn’t be some peace keeping mission, or some other thing that would have taken American lives. Ultimately, it just feels like whomever we elect gets a 4 year chance to prove themselves, and then we either decide to reelect them, or give them the boot. Elections are basically chances to change power, and not necessarily install the guy/gal you want (since you have no idea how that guy/gal will behave until they actually get in office).
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