~ a column by Colleen O’Brien
I hope you all voted. We were reminded so many times to do so in the last month I feared any anti-authoritarian would just shut down and go fishing. There’s a condescension in repeating directives, and people get this; we aren’t all dumb deplorables. An occasional reminder of the county treasurer who lost by one (1) vote – that’s a good goad to get us to the polls. What if it were you or I, the skeptics, who did not vote, even if it was just forgetfulness, and our erstwhile choice was left without a job that we wanted her in?
A friend sent me a column by Beth Hoffman from the publication In the Dirt. The woman is a political writer, and even she can take it no longer. She’d rather hang out with her goats, who she thinks are greedy, pushy and selfish, like humans in general but not as bad as politicians in particular.
“How can a person take in endless negativity without becoming negative?” asks Hoffman.
Indeed. I’m with this gal. I voted, but for my sanity, I have to take a break, not easy in an era of second-by-second updates and endless repetitions. It’s difficult to escape them – my cell phone pinged all the time with the latest news, the gas pump told me the headlines as soon as I started pumping, and all bars and most restaurants have a blaring Fox News station telling me some nonsense that I can only assume is a lie because so much of its announcements have been so in the last decade, and why would they change now?
We’ve voted, or not, and we wait to find out if our guys and gals won. Depending, we then relax for a bit (the losers haven’t started in yet), or we moan and groan and shudder at what the other side is going to do to undermine our freedoms of press, education and health care because we know the newly elected, D or R, will make the gasoline, food and taxes go up for everyone but the rich.
Many governmental goings-on were secondary to my real life as an adult. Now I read something about the fiscal crisis of the ‘70s and try to recall if I knew that at the time. Was I paying attention during Watergate, when the most insidious of politically criminal types were sneaking around stealing the integrity out from under us and our country?
I confess I was busy being married, rearing children, working at a job outside the home, reading murder mysteries to escape real life; volunteering for candidates came up only every four years.
America survived my negligence. Maybe not as purely as I wanted her to, but still dedicated to of, by and for the people. The older I grew, the more I paid attention – I sent in bits of money, walked precincts, cold-called voters, worked the polls. I wrote letters to the editor and columns questioning the behavior of the opposition and praising my guy/gal.
To live in a democracy requires stepping up to volunteer or complain and publicly question elected officials – from school board to U.S. President. The idea is that each of us does as much as she or he can to carry on the only decent kind of government.
I go on with my life, politics never far from my interest but not as compelling right now, sick and tired of pollsters and candidates as I am. When I was young, I thought the deal was that I voted for candidates because it was a job they wanted; like I had a job I liked. Their job was taking care of the country, the press watching them for us.
Maybe this has never been true. But it does appear to me that some of the people in these jobs are slackers – not doing their jobs. So, as I live in and like a democratic republic, I pay attention, even though, like Beth Hoffman, to save my goodwill and sanity, I too slack off and after an election eschew the news and the politicos. For a time.
