Re[2]: [at-l] The Government and The Environment - TOTALLY OFF TOPIC

[cballs@mindspring.com (cballs@mindspring.com)]

rafeb@adelphia.net wrote:
SNIP
>>I keep pinching myself wondering when the bad dream will end.
How did this idiot make it to the oval office?  What were we 
thinking?

>>>Alert and informed citizenry?  Why is it that our voter turnout 
rates are the lowest in the western world?  In many regards, 
our democracy is wasted on us.


Because we have elections based on personalities and not on issues.  Because we have a media that is more concerned with who's winning or losing the horce race than with the horses' plans for the pasture after the race because that's the nature of the short-term attention spans of their viewers whose brains have been conditioned to think in 30 second sound bites and reductive reasoning as a result of being raised on television. Because what issues the various media (particularly electronic media from which most people's sense of reality is shaped) do spend time examining are mostly hot-button issues like flag burning or gays in the military or abortion rights or who's having sex with whom...issues that are highly emotionally charged and that television loves but that just simply don't affect and don't matter to the lives of most Americans one way or the other while the really important political issues of where is the tax money? who are we collecting it from? who's spending it!
? what are we spending it for? does it make sense? what societal and human needs can government reasonably and intelligently administer? how can our civic institutions recover from the lust and greed of mercantile values that have come to dominate and define the value of all of American life as Walt Whitman warned they would. These issues for the most part go begging for an audience.  They are more complicated, mundane issues and require consensus building and honest, frank discussion free from the influence of lobbysts and PACs with briefcases full of cash and a media willing to investigate and question the press releases and official reports of government agencies, corporate boards and campaign directors and an educated public capable of independent thought instead of the functional illiterates we turn out by the tens of thousands year after year after year from the secondary schools and our institutions of so-called "higher learning."  Because there is only one political pa!
rty in the United States called The Money Party with two wings - the Right and the Left a.k.a. Republican and Democratic both ultimately controlled by the business and corporate interests that fund them, which is why most people don't bother to vote because they know it doesn't really matter.  The liars and thieves at Enron haven't helped any of this.

Vote Balls!