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.
