I was on another blogger’s post one day, and during our conversation’s back-and-forth we came to the conclusion that America’s voting public has ADD. Now I know I’m not a medical or psychiatric professional, and I don’t believe he is either, but it seems like a simple diagnosis.
ADD = Attention Deficit Disorder. This is something I have a mild case of myself, but not when it comes to important matters like politics, career, etc. Without getting too technical about this, the condition is as it says, a person (or in my later point, the public) has a hard time maintaining focus on the matter at hand, and is easily distracted by other things, often even trivial ones.
This directly applies to the problem of our voting public in today’s America. JibJab’s “What We Call The News” is a poke at the lack of journalistic integrity of our news outlets, but they even allude to America’s ADD by mentioning that 3% of people can find Kabul on a map, but 96% have seen Britney Spear’s privates.
Where I see this ADD often play out is when the public doesn’t hold a politician’s feet to the fire for false promises, statements, or other. Often this is because they don’t remember what the politician said in his/her last speech.
Example: Obama claims he will not run for President in 2008.
Result: He is our president.
Example: Cheney lists reasons for NOT toppling Saddam.
Result: We invade Iraq.
I’m guessing that most viewers don’t remember one or both of just two of these examples. But so what, right? Politicians are masters of gamesmanship. They are also masters of perception. On top of this ego is the main driving factor for most of them to hit national office. So, you’ve got egotistical masterminds of playing games of perception choosing the fate of this country. That’s what.
Now 10-15 years ago, I was one of those people who said “who cares about politics?” It wasn’t long after muttering those words when I started noticing the consistencies of injustices by these politicians, and that they were driven by gaining votes to clinch elections which served to justify their tactics, and further inflate their egos. What do most people do after saying similar words, and seeing some of the same things? Blow it off, ignore, complain. As a business owner, I’ve never seen a lot of results come from complaining, so I began to educate myself. I sat down and mapped out what issues I felt to be important. I then thought about how to solve the problems, or what problems the issues I supported might cause. After this, I looked to politicians that claimed to have the answers, and followed them. If they followed through as incumbents, they got my vote. If not, I voted for the next person who claimed to agree, and so on.
The problem is, this takes some time, interest and work. Our sound-bite society is more interested in complaining than taking initiative and fixing a problem. You DO get what you pay for. In this case, the price offered is lack of interest. The product delivered, deceitful and inept politicians. Just like in human beings, they try to help those with ADD, we really need to help our public overcome this hinderance.
Filed under: Politics | Tagged: ADD, attention, Bush, Centrist, Cheney, Conservative, Deficit, Democrat, disorder, Indepependent, liberal, moderate, Obama, Politics, public, republican, Third, united states, Vote, voting | 6 Comments »
