Friday, January 22, 2010

Single issue madness, ignorant apathy, and the end of the United States.

Recently I have had a couple of friends express support, in a very general way, for politicians that they are in agreement with, on only one issue that I am aware of. In fact one of them told me they she didn't really agree with a particular politician on most issues but that she supported her because they did agree on one issue. Please forgive me, but how can anyone see this as anything but insane? Dick Cheney supports same sex marriage but I could never support him because his views overall are in direct conflict with my views overall. If a senator or representative supported universal health care while at the same time promoting further financial industry deregulation I could never vote for them as their election would be bad for our country. If a politician is pro-gun or anti-abortion would that allow you to ignore the fact that they might also be a rapist or a serial killer? If someone knocks on your door and says that they support working against climate change could you look past the white robe and hood they are wearing? Many people apparently can and do.

The problem is that the crazy, single issue people who wear blinders when they walk into a voting booth are pretty much the better of two evils right now. It seems that people either care only about one issue or they care about nothing at all. They reject politics as being boring or pointless. They have given up on our government because they see it as corrupt and incapable of doing anything to benefit people like themselves. Well they may be right, but if they are they must also understand the only reason our government is as corrupt and incompetent as it is, the only reason it was able to get to this point is because we allowed it to be. We were so busy being either completely apathetic or so worked up over only one thing that we forgot about every other issue and those other issues have come back to haunt us.

Well congrats America, you are on the verge of getting exactly what you want. A government so far out of your control that all of your ideas about it will be proven true. It will be completely incapable of working for the majority of people in his country and it will be beyond our control so that we can do nothing about it. After years of working towards this goal we finally managed to get a set of Supreme Court justices just bad enough that they can overturn Supreme Court ruling after ruling, overturn a century of political practice in this country and decide that corporations, corporations that can't vote, corporations that might be controlled by individuals from other countries, heck, that might be controlled by the governments of other countries, can now put as much money into supporting or working against any candidate that they want, in other words any corporation, any government, any enemy of the United States can now buy an election here and put into power the people who will make the laws in this country. "This message brought to you by your friends at Al Qaeda." Sound scary? It is scary, no one, conservative, liberal, Democrat or Republican should rest easy knowing that we may have just given China the ability to decide the future of our country. We may have just given Wal-Mart the power to pick our next president, we may have just given our country away to the highest bidder.

So now what do we do? Well we will probably wind up doing nothing until it is too late, I really doubt we will do anything then, we have become to fat and lazy to care any more. If, however, by some strange chance we decide to do anything then we must first decide to take action, even if we think it might not help, even if this isn't "our issue", we must make those calls and send those emails, we must get out and carry signs, we must show, beyond any reasonable doubt, that this is completely unacceptable and that our law makers must now work to come up with a way from keeping this from happening. Some have already started working on this problem but as we have seen partisanship means it will be almost impossible for a bill to actually get passed. So call your senators, send your representative a letter and let them know that you don't care if they are as fat and wrinkled as an elephant or smell like an ass, they must get this done if our nation has any hope of remaining a place to have pride in.