Had lunch with some fellow geezers yesterday - two couples who have attended St. Luke's for far longer than we have been members - and one guy mentioned apropos of nothing in particular: "Isn't it funny that Trump is running for every local office, from governor to representative to dog catcher?" I assume he is a Trump voter, though that hardly seems to affect his or my everyday life.
He didn't defend our Fearless Leader but I did take his point: every ad we see on TV focuses on how the candidate will take on Trump or otherwise resist the corrupt regime currently running the country. He is likely correct in his implying that most of those candidates will not have much effect on national politics once in office. And I certainly would like to know more about what policies and philosophies they avow.
I also heard on some talk show that a recent poll revealed that 57 percent of registered voters plan to vote in the coming midterm elections. That number seems woeful... but then I read that the normal turnout for off-year elections is 40 percent.
A couple days ago I read that the Texas run-off on May 26 featured a 36 percent drop-off in participation for the Republican senate nomination, and that, in the end, under 10 percent of the estimated eligible Republican-leaning voters bothered to participate.
Add in the fact that only 57 percent of eligible voters across the country are actually registered to vote, and a guy could start thinking that our democracy is not all that important to about four in ten people around us.
I want to blame this complacency on something: poor civics education, lack of patriotism, ineffective government, or just social media, in general... but Americans have voted in low numbers for many years, through wars and depressions and recessions and long before the internet dominated everything.
This may be a stretch, but all this reminds me that there is some "common wisdom" that about 20 percent of high school students are involved in 80 percent of school activities, from sports to clubs to performing groups. Lots of schools love to brag about their co-curricular offerings and most spend quite a large chunk of money on supporting all those offerings.
Often, parents will make decisions about where to send little Billy or Suzie based on those somewhat public activities, along with the overall academic rankings.
So, comprehensive high schools are often gauged by how a rather small percentage of the student body does in those public situations. Is that all that different from how someone from, say, Spain, might assess the quality of the American government or society in general?
Every day I am reminded that the Trump administration is indistinguishable from an organized crime family, blatantly fleecing us all with no immediate consequences beyond late night talk show jokes and often unhinged social media posts.
That motivates me to cast my lonely ballot, of course, but for many Americans, nothing could convince them to exercise their fundamental right to vote.
That is how we get a current president elected with less than half of even those who bothered to vote, and with about 236 million eligible voters and Trump receiving 77 million votes... well, that means about 33 percent of Americans elected our wannabe King.
Just typing that makes my spirits sink.
As Woody Allen once said, "80 percent of success in life is showing up."
Americans, whether in high school or more generally, often choose to not show up.
No comments:
Post a Comment