At lunch today, my co-worker Nick remarked that he didn't know who he would vote for, since he didn't like anyone that was running. This during a phase in the election, just before the primaries, when we have a maximum number of candidates.
He's right, though. There are no good choices when it comes to elections. The people that make it through the election process are rarely what the country actually needs. And I'm not sure we would recognize what we need or elect a person like that if they actually came along.
When I was first learning to drive, I had a little problem. I tended to veer back and forth on the road. I had a problem that someone figured out and explained to me. I was looking at a point about 10 feet in front of the hood of the car. My focus was so close to the car that I was overreacting to every little bend in the road or movement of the car. Whoever figured out that I was doing this also had a cure for the problem. I remember being told to focus on a point further down the road, to lift my viewpoint up and align myself with where I wanted to be farther out down the road.
And so it is with the country. We elect leaders that are so short sighted that they have the country veering back and forth from the left to the right instead of barrelling forward and taking us where we need to go. Due to the 2 year election cycle, we are always campaigning. Leaders are not rewarded for making tough choices and fixing long term problems. They are rewarded by the public - this IS a democracy - for coming out on top of the most recent news cycle. And the people are to blame because we forget so quickly as a group. We forget the problems and mistakes that people make and re-elect the same bozos year after year to go back to Washington and raise funds for their next election rather than working on what the nation truly needs to have done.
If you were a professional assessor and were hired to make a prioritized list of the biggest and most important problems that the nation has, that list would not reflect what we see on the news. Budget, health care, social security, medicare, national defense, space defense, and education and investment in research and technology. That's the highest priorities I come up with (given just a few minutes reflection). Instead, we argue about immigration. We don't even have honest arguments about any of the subjects. It's like a trial where both sides hire their expert witnesses that come in and give opposite views and everyone that wants their side to win thinks their expert is perfect and the other side's expert is a crackpot.
I was recently asked if I thought that America had seen its high point and if our greatest days were behind us. My answer to that is that if we don't correct course and learn to focus on long term problems, that it certainly could be a downward slope for us. But all we have to do is raise our focus up from the ground right in front of our feet and start looking at where we want to be a bit further down the road.
1 comment:
Mike,
Another fantastic analogy! We ARE weaving back and forth, from party to party, pole to pole, in a never-ending cycle!
It's depressing because of name-recognition. Because they've heard of someone more than another, the typical voter will vote for that candidate, even though someone else might better represent their personal interests and principles.
What's really sad is, that's what makes "raising the most money" help you win. Most of the time, the candidate who raises the most money wins. What really upsets me is that these candidates already HAVE jobs but are ALLOWED to shirk those duties to campaign. What they should do, with the technology we have at our fingertips, is do their job AND campaign from one place...for FREE. No one should have an advantage based solely on money raised. They should be able to stand on their own principles, record, and promises...then KEEP those promises.
But that's a pipe-dream.
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