My goodness, it’s 39 days since my last posting. Sorry ‘bout that.
I’m not quite sure why that happened. Perhaps I just needed a break. I’ve been working on a few other things, like some poems and a novel. – I’ve always felt that if you’re not reading a good book you should be writing one. – But I think it’s mostly because the task I’ve set myself (to sort through all this church crap) really doesn’t interest me the way I thought it would. Of course, some psychologist might say that I’m just avoiding the pain of self discovery, and some psychologist could well be right, but even that doesn’t interest me very much. If I’m in denial I’m not about to admit it, even to myself. And, besides, at my age denial is one of the few coping strategies that still works. So I’m going to head off in a new direction.
My son Mark, who’s in his mid thirties and has been challenging my thinking, and pretty much everything else, all his life, sent me an email a few days ago railing against the state of politics in this country. He is outraged, as I am, with our dysfunctional parliament that focuses on scandal and partisan political advantage to the exclusion of important issues. He suggested that this is the main reason for the low voter turnout in federal elections, which is something I have believed for some time, but then he made an interesting comment: My, perhaps cynical, suspicion is that they are all happy with the diminishing voter turnout for various reasons.
He’s not suggesting the parties have hatched some dark conspiracy to drive voter turnout down, but merely that it’s not to their partisan advantage to drive it up. In our voting system all you need is more votes than your opponents, so convincing people not to vote for them is as effective as getting people to vote for you. So we have politicians dissing one another until they’ve convinced us they’re all a bunch of fools and frauds, and we just stop caring. A government then is elected with 38% of a 48% turnout, or the support of 18.24% of eligible voters.
I think I’ll write about some of this political stuff for a while, and I’d love to hear your thoughts.
- Do you vote?
- Do you care?
- Are you satisfied with the way the system works?
- Do you think we should be concerned?
- Do you have any ideas?
