This is more of a neutral political commentary than caregiving or brain health reflection. You may want to skip over this particular post. 🙂
At this point I’m not sure whether it will be convenient for me to vote on Tuesday or not. Because I have higher priorities I’m not too concerned about this. With the presidential candidates we have there are many who identify with my apathy. Then again, precisely because of how distinctive these presidential candidates are, many might think this is the most crucial election of all. This provides me a golden opportunity to place voting in a context you are not going to get from mass media or political parties.
Many citizens, sometimes most, do not vote in a USA election. This contrasts starkly with democracies in European countries. The conclusion passed along by mass venues such as broadcast media is we’ve grown apathetic in our affluence and indulgence. While the indulgence part fits, a greater proportion of European citizens have reached a minimum standard of affluence than USA citizens. There must be another, additional explanation for our apathy.
As a highest priority, a country could attempt to get all their citizens to vote, or could make sure citizens meet proper standards and hurdles to minimize fraudulent or undeserved voting. Those two objectives are mutually exclusive. European nations focus on the former, we focus on the latter. That, more than indulgence and certainly more than affluence, accounts for our relative apathy in voting.
Setting standards and hurdles to vote serves a purpose, but it is not really to prevent fraudulent voting or whatever else you may think. Even if you were to eliminate the corporate shenanigans that goes on in our country, resources will not be equally distributed in a corporate economy. The nature of this resource distribution in an investment and hierarchical driven system will be many more “have nots” than “haves,” even without the corruption that infuses our particular corporate economy. If getting all citizens to vote is a country’s highest priority, that country will have many more “have nots” than “haves” voting. The more a country is devoted to a corporate economy the more that is a bad idea, for the “have nots” might try to curb ways that government indulges corporations.
They might or, then again, might not. Unfortunately, our marketing culture seeks to wrap information in emotion rather than context. Humans are an extremely intelligent species. We can make good decisions when information is wrapped in proper context. Ah, but appealing to our emotions is like a drug that dulls the senses or, more to the point, dulls our ability to think critically. This applies to everyone, “haves” or “have nots,” liberals or conservatives, high school drop-outs or PhDs. Appeal to our emotions effectively and we will shoot ourselves in the foot …. or believe the information disseminated by our favorite interest groups and mass media.
Still, if the “have nots” are informed with proper context, and it is easy enough for them to vote, they might try to curb the government indulgences needed for a corporate economy to succeed, indulgences that range from intellectual property to legally defining corporations as individuals to sponsoring overthrows of governments. There’s a reason why the bigger the government the better corporations are able to thrive. Indeed, corporations are the only necessary reason for big government. We may fault big government for a plethora of ills, sometimes justifiably, sometimes not, but most of those ills has little to do with why our government became big; that was for the sake of commerce and nurturing corporations to be successful, usually at the expense of a proprietor driven economy.
Take away all the ways government must necessarily indulge corporations for them to succeed, or even to exist, and you are left with proprietorships having the competitive advantage in a true free market economy. Thus, the more the “haves” are committed to a corporate economy rather than a free market economy, or even the “have nots” that interest groups and media have emotionally charged, the more that becomes a truly frightening idea to a citizenry. So we have standards and hurdles for citizens to vote, the first ingredient for an oligarchy, promulgating the fear of fraudulent or undeserved voting, rather than have a situation where too many “have nots” may muck things up for a corporate economy suckling off of government. Indeed, the more you may be a “have not” in this country, the more likely your vote simply doesn’t matter … or even contributes to making things worse for yourself.
Yet even if we were like a European country with a high percentage of citizens voting, ours is not the highest form of government as all our schooling and patriotic groups would have us believe. Well, I suppose “highest” can mean whatever a society wants it to, but ours is certainly not the most responsible form of governance. That would be participatory government, not representative government. When you vote you are, at best, hoping that “representatives” will indulge you by making good, responsible decisions on your behalf. What a surprise that, in our system where “money is free speech,” decisions tend to represent and indulge wealth and corporate interests more than indulging the average voter. There is a reason why our system now has been shown to be oligarchical; that is the natural direction for a representative government if allowed to serve itself. This is something that our Supreme Court, usually dominated by corporate lawyers over the years, has done a brilliant job at enabling. It’s time both the “haves” and “have nots” realize this.
Fortunately, in our democratic, federated system there still are plenty of ways in which a citizen may be responsible rather than indulged (or exploited!), may act on information that they experience in its proper context, rather than vote on information wrapped in emotion by mass media. In our country of widely varying states and local communities, we may participate in ways that directly better ourselves and our neighbors regardless of whether we vote for a nation’s representative candidates. So while I may or may not miss voting for a president this year to help indulge (or exploit!) the country, I will be responsibly participating to make the life of at least one person around me better. Caregivers by their endeavors fulfill the most important requirement of a responsible citizenry. Unfortunately, not all voters are engaged in some type of responsible service to others, even though they may pride themselves on fulfilling their “responsibility” to vote.
