Rant on elections
Feb. 6th, 2004 05:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
winterbadgerI posted this as a reply to someone else, but I want to keep it here as well.
I know plenty of people who aren't college educated and who work their asses off but are still able to read a paper or listen to the TV or radio from time to time. They're also most of them capable of thinking fairly incisively about things; people don't get dumb just because they're busy. And the intellectuals you suggest are somehow the only ones equipped to make informed choices but who you imply are not bothering to vote make up only a small portion of the population. For better or worse, all the non-intellectuals out there vote too; and just because they don't have a BA or an MBA doesn't mean they can't make intelligent choices.
The problem is not that poor people work too hard to make good choices or that smart people are too lazy to vote, but that people are essentially selfish. The problem isn't usually the people who work hard or the people who are smart and well educated and engaged. It's the middle-class, middle-brow people who are so consumed by their own lives that they can't see a foot beyond their little circle of job, kids, reality TV, and rampant consumerism to imagine the lives of others. They see everything through the lens of their own advantage or their own needs and don't care what the consequences of their getting what they want will be for other people or for the society as a whole.
Americans as a whole have cheap gas because as consumers we demand the ability to go wherever we want as fast as possible in large, expensive cars without regard for fuel consumption, environmental degradation from drilling/processing/transport, pollution from combustion, or the effect on other countries of the policies we have to pursue to keep the cheap oil flowing to our shores.
We insist on having our registration-free, license-free, responsibility-free guns because we're more interested in defending our own houses, our own little islands in the sea of chaos, than trying to see to it that our neighborhoods and our towns and cities are safe enough that no one needs to have guns.
Americans are happy to have estate taxes and income taxes slashed (because we all figure we're going to be rich one day), but we keep on expecting all the benefits and programs that those taxes were going to fund. We're outraged at the idea that we should have to pay to have clean, well maintained streets, clean water to drink, streetlights, safe airports and ports, someone to come rescue us when our house catches fire, someone to make sure that the office building we work in, the food we buy, and the toys we give our children are safe.
We cut support for the poor and disadvantaged because we assume that anyone can succeed and that people who apply for Aid to Families with Dependent Children, foodstamps, Section 8 housing assistance, or Medicaid are just lazy malingerers; we assume this despite, in most cases, not having tried to make our way with the disadvantages suffered by people who routinely need those services. We want voucher programs to allow us to take our children out of schools that may have problems, because we want *our* children to have the perfect education even if it means that the schools are then worse for the kids of the other people who can't afford "our" schools, even with vouchers. Or maybe we take our kids out of schools entirely, because schools have "those people" in them (whoever "those people" may be) and the last thing we want to do is have our children learn that other cultures and other points of view than our own may have value.
We're only concerned with ourselves, and not with others. *That's* why we vote for people who promise tax cuts, spending increases, and still insist there will be a balanced budget. Who lie to us and then promise to investigate themselves. Who spread hate about "draft-dodgers" and "pot smokers" while shielding their own failings from the bright light of public scrutiny.
We really have no one to blame but ourselves.
I know plenty of people who aren't college educated and who work their asses off but are still able to read a paper or listen to the TV or radio from time to time. They're also most of them capable of thinking fairly incisively about things; people don't get dumb just because they're busy. And the intellectuals you suggest are somehow the only ones equipped to make informed choices but who you imply are not bothering to vote make up only a small portion of the population. For better or worse, all the non-intellectuals out there vote too; and just because they don't have a BA or an MBA doesn't mean they can't make intelligent choices.
The problem is not that poor people work too hard to make good choices or that smart people are too lazy to vote, but that people are essentially selfish. The problem isn't usually the people who work hard or the people who are smart and well educated and engaged. It's the middle-class, middle-brow people who are so consumed by their own lives that they can't see a foot beyond their little circle of job, kids, reality TV, and rampant consumerism to imagine the lives of others. They see everything through the lens of their own advantage or their own needs and don't care what the consequences of their getting what they want will be for other people or for the society as a whole.
Americans as a whole have cheap gas because as consumers we demand the ability to go wherever we want as fast as possible in large, expensive cars without regard for fuel consumption, environmental degradation from drilling/processing/transport, pollution from combustion, or the effect on other countries of the policies we have to pursue to keep the cheap oil flowing to our shores.
We insist on having our registration-free, license-free, responsibility-free guns because we're more interested in defending our own houses, our own little islands in the sea of chaos, than trying to see to it that our neighborhoods and our towns and cities are safe enough that no one needs to have guns.
Americans are happy to have estate taxes and income taxes slashed (because we all figure we're going to be rich one day), but we keep on expecting all the benefits and programs that those taxes were going to fund. We're outraged at the idea that we should have to pay to have clean, well maintained streets, clean water to drink, streetlights, safe airports and ports, someone to come rescue us when our house catches fire, someone to make sure that the office building we work in, the food we buy, and the toys we give our children are safe.
We cut support for the poor and disadvantaged because we assume that anyone can succeed and that people who apply for Aid to Families with Dependent Children, foodstamps, Section 8 housing assistance, or Medicaid are just lazy malingerers; we assume this despite, in most cases, not having tried to make our way with the disadvantages suffered by people who routinely need those services. We want voucher programs to allow us to take our children out of schools that may have problems, because we want *our* children to have the perfect education even if it means that the schools are then worse for the kids of the other people who can't afford "our" schools, even with vouchers. Or maybe we take our kids out of schools entirely, because schools have "those people" in them (whoever "those people" may be) and the last thing we want to do is have our children learn that other cultures and other points of view than our own may have value.
We're only concerned with ourselves, and not with others. *That's* why we vote for people who promise tax cuts, spending increases, and still insist there will be a balanced budget. Who lie to us and then promise to investigate themselves. Who spread hate about "draft-dodgers" and "pot smokers" while shielding their own failings from the bright light of public scrutiny.
We really have no one to blame but ourselves.
