I am suffering from a bit of politics fatigue today. Part of me wants the election to be over now. I am not sure if I want to look forward or if I should dread the possible results. I find that I no longer want to argue about the candidates with the Gather crowd. Why? Because I am not changing your minds at this point and you are certainly not changing mine. It is only making me push the envelope of civility when I encounter people who disagree with me and that is making me feel tired and a bit guilty.
I have to remind myself of a few things that will be the same on Wednesday. We will still be in Iraq with our young men dying every day. We will still be arguing about how to deal with the Islamic world. We will still be about evently split between half of us that think that global warming is real and half that do not, with almost all the scientists in the first half. We will still be citizens of the most powerful and fabulously wealthy nation of our planet, which operates under a sytem of laws and traditions that confer a great degree of personal freedom. Yet this nation will also still be profoundly disunified, wracked by antagonisms of class, religion, and political viewpoint that seem to defy efforts to reforge solidarity. We seem to this observer to also face a challenge to tone down our materialism and restore the value of sustainability to our economic and environmental activities- but that problem seems totally intractable, because each half of us blames the other half for this materialism, and only a small minority of either half really understand how unsustainable our lifestyles have become.
It's a tall order. My viewpoint is that we are too easily distracted from the main event by everything from politics itself to the Jolie/Pitt/Anniston triangle. What is the main event? We do not even agree on that! Many of you will say of course Islamic terror is the greatest challenge of the 21st century. But I do not even put it on my top ten. I consider it an absurd distraction from the challenge of survival posed by the last lap of our race to balance population and resources. This is the century when humanity finally reaches the 9 billion mark and hopefully stop there, and I think it will be interesting to see if we can feed them all without eliminating most of the other living things on our planet.
After the election let's take a moment to calm down and then look at our priorites. Perhaps there may be a couple things that show up on the top ten list of many of us.
recommend this
email
print
link to this page
Comments: 7
Our elected officails seem to have lost the ability to discuss situations constructively. They do not seem to be able to define the problems we have with immigration, terrorism, education, and a host of other subjects.
They took longer to write a report on the 9/11 bombings than it took us to defeat the Germans and the Japanese.
I blame each political party equally for being more interested in damaging their opponents than in helping their constituents.
Sadly, I do not know the solution to our problem except another Great Depression.
Perhaps, if we, as a nation, had to face a situation where great sacrifices were not optional, but demanded, we could get our mind of of gadgets, gossip and goodtimes.
well, 2008 is fast approaching and some candidates for the nomination are going to have to position themselves nationally, so i think this is not the year for escape from partisanship.
i don't mind having an election and all the advertising. but i want elections to end, americans to come together for the good of their country.
yeah, yeah, dream on.