I hope my good friend in San Diego isn't too disappointed in me after he reads this post, but my frustration-mixed-with-apathy (weird combination, yes) has reached a sort of critical mass. Mind you, since it's half apathy, don't be disappointed if you don't read a lot of seething vitriol. You see, this San Diego friend of mine is big into politics and rallies as many people as he can to the polls every election day. I really do have to admire him for that, because I just couldn't work up the enthusiasm for it, even if my life depended on it ... well, okay, maybe if my life depended on it. In fact, before we became friends, I voted in maybe half the Presidential elections and that was about it. It sounds terrible, I know, because it's our "civic duty" and all ... but I'm becoming less enthusiastic about it every year, and can barely see the point anymore.
It's not that I think the act of voting is pointless -- although with however the Electoral College process managed to get jury-rigged enough to get George W. Bush shoehorned into the White House in 2000, I have my doubts there -- but instead, I really seriously have to wonder what good it does anymore to have a certain person in a certain elected office? When you think about it, there are enough people in Washington with opposing viewpoints and agendas, that if one governmental body gets their way, another one is there to knock it down if they have the gumption. It's called "checks and balances", and though it was originally meant to keep any one person or group from wielding too much power, it has lately done little more than to stymie any true progress by the government -- at least toward anything constructive. If the legislative branch wants something, the executive can still veto it, but then the judicial branch might have the final say. I have to wonder if there's too much government, or not enough.
And then there are the damn-blasted political ads that saturate the TV. What's the point of them, or even of campaigning in general? All the candidates say the same things: "I'll create more jobs. I'll shape up our schools. I'll fix health care." Sounds familiar, doesn't it? Each candidate will promise anything the public wants to hear because they want to get elected, whether or not he or she has a plan on how to accomplish what they promise. (And besides, their opponent will tear apart what they say, or just recklessly criticize their plan anyway, no matter how half-baked their plan or their opponent's plan is.) Every election campaign boils down to nothing more than a popularity contest, and I've never been big on popularity contests. The truth of the matter is, we'll never be able to tell what a candidate will or won't accomplish until they're in office, so I try not to rack my brain on who I vote for or why. Besides, most voters out there, I'd bet you money, just vote blindly partisan -- whoever's representing the party in which they're registered, without even reading up on what that candidate has to say.
But I'm getting off topic (and trying my darnedest to narrow my focus so this blog entry isn't half a mile long). One of my big problems here is how rowdy the American voters have gotten lately, and how uncivilized their vicious partisanship has become. The Democrats and the Republicans are each screaming just as loudly about how the other party is going to destroy this country. And each side is getting louder and louder all the time, so in order to be heard, they have to exaggerate and sensationalize their arguments more and more profoundly. President Obama has actually been called a "socialist" and a "communist", largely by people who don't know what those labels really mean ... and all because he wants every American to have affordable health care. Isn't name-calling something that fourth-graders do on school playgrounds? You know, the kids who are afraid of "cooties"?
The liberals and conservatives in this country are so verbally at each other's throats that I find myself wishing we'd just go all-out, have ourselves another big civil war ('cause we've only had one so far), and get it over with already. Then the conservatives can go live in their own part of our torn-in-half country, and the liberals can have their own half. In some ways, we might as well, 'cause this country is far too screwed up for any one President or any one Presidential administration to be able to fix in one four-year term, or even two. It'll take decades, and it'll take some major, earth-shattering (hopefully not in the literal sense) change. And what makes it worse is that the short attention spans of the American people, and their need for instant gratification, are so pronounced now that if the guy in office doesn't effect change RIGHT NOW, they vote in the guy from the other party, so that no one has the time to get anything accomplished. Do we honestly expect Obama to turn this country around in two years, after letting Bush play around with it for eight friggin' years?!?
We all want what's best for our country, I get that. But what's best for our country isn't the pervasive distrust that has led us to treat election day like a battle. ("Oh crap, the Republicans have taken over the House of Representatives. Now we're screwed." Are we so sure we wouldn't be screwed if they hadn't?) How do we know that there isn't one candidate somewhere out there who actually has that plan -- the one that will actually work at starting us out on fixing everything that's wrong with our society -- and that he or she has gotten lost in the flotsam, because their opponent didn't shut the hell up long enough to hear them out? I'd bet you anything that, 150 years from now, our descendants (in whatever country this ends up being, unless the United States of America actually manages to survive that long) will look back at these years and laugh at how childish we all have been acting.
Aren't we all Americans? That's the thing that most people seem to be forgetting around November 2nd. To paraphrase Jon Stewart in a rally he recently hosted: the more we all shout, the harder it is for us to hear one another. And if I may employ another old saying: if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. Therefore, I'm going to do my best to stop complaining about the government, because I (like 99.9% of the rest of the country) don't have a damn clue how to make it better, though we can guess all we please. If we all really want what's best for our country, we need to start acting that way. We need to stop bitching about what's wrong with the other guys, and start working with them to turn this country into something we can all be proud of.
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