....More on the Government We Vote For
By Thomas D. Segel (09/12/08)
Harlingen, Texas September 11, 2008: With an army of political partisans, pundits and vacuum heads filling the hard copy and electronic media with an overabundance of both written and verbal trash, I elected to block out both the Internet and television. Some space and time was needed to clear my head and try to make a rational decision about our national approach to electing those who will govern the nation.
An often-used observation is “People get the government they vote for.” Or “People get the government they deserve.” Here the observation is quite simple. We, as a nation, accept…and even encourage those seeking political office to “spin”, “equivocate”, “omit”, “ignore”, “plagiarize”, “pander”, “prostitute”, “cheat”, plus out and out “lie” in pursuit of power. We accept the utter falseness of their campaigns, knowing full well that most of what has been placed on the table for us to view is complete bilge-wash.
There can be a strong argument made that almost half of our country accepts the above premise as hard fact and has completely opted out of the election system. In all of our elections for national office the turnout of the voting age population runs from a high of 63% in 1960 to a low of just over 36% in 1998. Even the highly contested presidential election of 2000 only brought out 51.3% of the 205,815,000 people who could have cast ballots for the candidate of their choice.
Why is this happening? Many believe we have moved from the voting booth to the auction block when it comes to elections. Americans have quit voting for the best possible governance and instead are voting on the impossible promises of candidates. Those who still vote make their marks next to the names of candidates who aim at what they feel is satisfying the special hatreds of their possible constituencies. If you hate the pocketbooks of those richer than yourself, they punch that button. If you have pain over the idea of abortion, they feed that fire. If the other guy has a better job or house or car…make it more difficult for him to keep them. If the other guy is weak, needy, lazy, too young, too old, too good, too nice, to bad, too ugly… paint him with a brush others can relish.
We have forgotten that those in elected office are there to serve all of the people equally. In place of having people who will govern on behalf of all, we have come to the two sided system of “parties” that even George Washington feared would bring our nation to the brink of collapse.
As long as we allow the worst of motives to dominate our electoral system, we lose. As long as we allow political hacks to dominate our elections we will lose. As long as we fail to demand complete honesty and fair-minded governance, we will lose. We accept all of the above today as the “business of politics” format…. and that is another reason why half of our citizens are turned-off by elections and have walked away from the ballot box. These are also the reasons we always end up with the government we deserve.
Semper Fidelis,
Thomas D. Segel
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