Today is V-day; the day we as a people in the United States get to voice our opinion. It is the day when the government is truly of the people; for this is the one day we can encourage our elected officials to “stay the course” if we like what they have been doing to this point, or we can “throw the scum out” should we not like their previous actions. A challenger is always a shot in the dark, we may have heard the speeches, read the position papers, etc., but until he or she is in office, we don’t have a firm idea as to what they will do.
This off year election has given us some of the loudest rhetoric, and greatest volumes of money spent, in 50 years. The number of sound bites, and the venom attached to a great majority of them, is incredible, even deafening. Candidates and their support groups, acknowledged and hidden, have chosen in the main to run not on their own records or ideas; rather, they tell us what the opponent has done, or will do, “wrong”. Fear has replaced hope; fear of those that don’t look like, or believe the same core religious doctrine, or come from a different background as “we” do. Pessimism has surpassed optimism, and left that grand ideal in the dust; a collective voice that asked the best of everybody now speaks of how bad it is and how much worse it will become. Gone, and I hope not forever, is the belief that this is the greatest country on Earth. The ideal of growing and improving, in respecting the diversity of our neighbors as a people, as a country, has been vanquished; we now fear our neighbors, our leaders, perhaps even ourselves.
Fear is not an inbred characteristic, watch a child as a prime example; they have no fear. We teach them to be afraid; it starts with the “Big Bad Wolf” of childhood and grows into the “Big Bad Other Person”, that person or group of which we have no understanding, no empathy, and certainly no sympathy. From Roosevelt through Reagan, we focused on the Soviet Union and other communist countries as “the enemy”; as our source of fear. Now that boogieman is gone, and our enemies are not countries or states, but individuals in stateless groups. Today, we focus on the music, the prayer mat, the color of the skin or the language natively spoken as we search for evil. Our politicians, and their handlers, know this; they constantly mine the data, search the demographics, and read the opinion pages to determine how in any given market to ratchet up the fear level in a particular population group in order to “drive” voters to the polls.
It does not have to be this way! You and I, fellow citizens, do have voices, we do have tools at our disposal to frustrate the pollsters and political advisors. The first tool is TODAY, the day you vote and let your own learned opinion show up at the ballot box, at the outcome of the election. Fortunately, it does not stop at close of voting tonight. We have a collective duty, a collective responsibility, to remind our elected officials on a regular basis of the promises they made, of our concerns and issues here at the kitchen table. You and I can keep up the pressure on them, we can communicate with them on a daily basis if we desire; let them know what we think. The “letter to the editor” page of your local paper is one way, phone calls and emails to their offices is yet another. Get involved today by voting, stay involved tomorrow by reminding them of the pledges they have made. It is OUR country, We The People have every right to determine how we are governed. Don’t let your country down; instead, vote, and stay involved.
No comments:
Post a Comment