It seems like things are just getting worse in the world. Quality jobs get harder to find as our quality of life gets worse. The value of our money is going down as well. Could our complacency when it comes to voting and how much thought we put into it be part of the problem?
How many times do you have a conversation about “throwing the bums out” of congress? It probably happens more times than you recall, but you dismiss those comments as quickly as they are spoken. How many times is one of the politicians you voted for part of the problem, and yet you don’t even realize it? Are you paying attention? Do you just vote out of instinct for the familiar name?
When it comes to voting, people talk on and on about it being our right to vote. It’s true, it is our right. However, I believe our founding fathers expected us to put the same amount of effort into voting as we put into our favorite hobbies. This means learning about the people and the issues we are voting for. This means paying at least as much attention to the issues as we do to the statistics of our favorite sports team, the latest fashion news and gossip or whatever is happening on our favorite TV shows.
The supposed two party system (there are more than two choices in case you are wondering) has many people in a trance. You register for a party, and when the election cycle comes around again, you get your party’s “marching orders” flyer in the mail and obediently cast your vote the way you were told to. That’s the way some people approach it, and it’s really doing as much damage to the process as not voting at all. What’s the point of that?
If you are on the Republican versus Democrat bandwagon, take a look and ask yourself a question. The country has leaned one way or the other very heavily at times during the past 20 years, putting one party in control. What has really changed for the better? How many politicians are still in office after all these years, acting as if they are entitled to be there no matter what they do? Do you think this is how it should be? I’m pretty sure a majority of people shrug their shoulders and say, “That’s just the way it is.”
You have about as many people eligible to vote in this country that chose not to as there are people who do vote. Why is that? Are they looking at the system and saying it is so corrupted that they don’t even care? Maybe they heard the tired old saying that if you don’t vote for either of the two “main” parties, you are throwing your vote away. That is such an arrogant and condescending attitude. No party has a right to your vote. The politician has to earn it, or at least they should.
I understand the realities of the world all too well. We need to make a living and pay the bills. Life gets stressful, and we deal with it by diving head first into the things we love the most. Politics is rarely one of them. In fact, people hate politics and politicians. They believe they are getting screwed by the politicians, and in a way, they are right. But, if somebody came to your house every day and stole something from you, would you just accept it or would you try to stop them? This is what is happening to this country, and the people we vote into office aren’t stopping it. It’s just getting worse. It needs to end.
Part of the reason we got into this mess is because we stopped really paying attention to what happens in Washington and our state houses and local governments. It became too much work for us to bother with. We need to pay attention and we need to get informed. We need to know what that proposition is that we are voting on and just who we are electing into office. It doesn’t stop there either. We need to stop just listening to news sound bytes and really pay attention to how what we voted for effects our lives. Then, we need to remember that when the next election comes around. If we don’t, it’s likely that things will just get worse as our rights and our quality of life goes down the drain.
