Voting is Important : What's the Point ?
It's an interesting time, right before a national election. You've got party stalwarts stumping for their candidates, impossible-to-believe undecideds coyly holding out as if torn between two lovers, third-party hopefuls defiant about their "wasted" but passionate votes, and nihilists on the fringe talking conspiracy theories, false equivalency, and the pointlessness of it all. Between Facebook, Twitter, cable TV, talk radio, blogs, and online newspapers and magazines, there's no dearth of coverage on all this rustling around; no way to get out of the loop unless you make a conscious effort to do so or you live in a van down by the river. And even a van can be equipped with Internet.
For those who like their political marching orders nice and easy, it's a simple matter of subscribing to the mandates of their church, family, ethnic group, union, demographic, party, favorite cable channel, or economic class and logging votes accordingly. But for those more independent sorts, the urge to seek education and enlightenment outside the compound is strong... and that's where it gets tricky. Because finding unmuddied political enlightenment in the glut of today's less than neutral media, whatever the medium.
There's something manically democratic about our ever-expanding media catalogue. And with that deepening glut of content to fill, loud-mouth editors of smash-mouth tabloids, recognized political veterans, and verbose but fairly articulate actors and rock stars, with all their opinions sitting equally, side-by-side, on the same virtual bookshelf. No differentiation is made for gravitas, merit, or expertise, no particular sniff test is applied to the veracity of what's being said and, one can guess, given the responses from the chattering classes, that no particular weight is shifted one way or the other based on qualifications. Hard, then, to ferret out what's worth believing. Particularly when so much of what's being said is contradictory, incendiary, or just plain bleak.
I had a friend once who spouted endlessly about the inescapable web of deceit we all live in as human beings on this earth -- the mysterious Illuminati, the World Bank, the stranglehold of Wall Street, the corruption of all governments -- and once, after a particularly heated diatribe, I asked, "So what am I supposed to do with all that?" It was an honest question. What is a normal, every day sort of person, raising a family, working a job, trying to make something useful of their life, supposed to do with all that apocalyptic information? He had no answers. Because there are none. Even if mad chicanery is actually as systemic as doomsayers would have us believe, we, those not knee-deep in secret societies and global conspiracies, have no knowledge of, hand in, or solutions for the nefarious world potentially existing behind the scrim. We just gotta get the mortgage paid and the kids to school on time.
So what do we do? An election rolls around, we want to fulfill our civic duty, and so we read, research, pay attention, and when we do, we're bombarded with all manner of tugging and pulling from this side or the other, right down to those who suggest it's all so dark there's really no point in voting anyway.
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