I Weep For Our Generation
Friday, October 24, 2008 at 07:30PM I've been doing impromptu polling, talking to my guitar and keyboard students, asking them who they're voting for--or if they're underage, who they'd like to vote for. I get answers on both sides, but the best anyone can muster is usually "I just like the things he says.", or "He just seems like he'd be better." Seriously--almost no one gives me a thoughtful reason. The TV and internet pundits talk about foreign policy, tax breaks, experience, etc., but I know something they don't: many, many, many people vote for the dumbest of reasons.
I heard one woman say, "I'm voting for Obama because I'm sick of paying health care premiums at work."
I hear things like that and I just want to go out in the back yard and kick a can around for an hour. A friend of mine told me his sister wouldn't vote for a guy one time because, "He has a square head. I'm not voting for someone with a square head." Sigh.
Here's a quote from Sci-Fi writer Robert Heinlein, written in 1987:
The America of my time line is a laboratory example of what can happen to democracies, what has eventually happened to all perfect democracies throughout all histories. A perfect democracy, a "warm body" democracy in which every adult may vote and all votes count equally, has no internal feedback for self-correction.... [O]nce a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader - the barbarians enter Rome.
On the lighter side, watching the news--which I do compulsively--is fun if you listen for mispronounced words. These are from "journalists"
'Integral' pronouced 'intrecal'
'Negotiate' pronounced 'neh-goh-see-ate'.
And of course, 'nuke-you-lurr'.
This season, I'm taking my fun where I find it.
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Reader Comments (1)
It's true: we put more thought into what we're going to have for dinner than into what we believe and the impact of our beliefs on our behavior - voting and otherwise. I used to get really mad at my friends for not voting, then I found out how little thought some people put into it. I think I'd rather some people didn't vote.