It’s easy to just wash your hands of anything political. It’s harder to stand and fight… or find a reason to.
I could say so much about a rigged system, but that term has been a cliché for so long it really doesn’t have meaning for most people. Walk in my shoes for a moment: For years I was a registered Republican in a Connecticut, a Blue state, where my vote never counted. When major national party candidates representing my state did advertise an R next to their name, most of the time their politics were virtually indistinguishable from the ones hawking a D. The only time I did anything close to being politically active was when a close personal friend was running for the state legislature in neighboring New York as a Democrat. I worked the phones with her team because I wanted her to win. It wasn’t because of any particular reason other than that she was a friend. If I had been pressed for some reason as to why I was registered as a Republican and working for a Democrat I probably would not have been able to express it. I had no idea.
The journey for me was one of evolving from being politically agnostic to becoming someone that read enough news to debate with friends and family on single issue matters when I felt it counted. It was always about a single issue and not about any deep underlying philosophy or an even deeper understanding of how things work. The intellectual pursuit of truth was frustrating because it seemed that I was on a lonely path with no direction signs. The duopoly of the political system meant choosing between one of two parties that were on different paths, neither of which intersected with mine. When trying to make decisions based on issues the choice always seemed clearer: I’m a social liberal, unlike most Republicans and a fiscal conservative, unlike most Democrats. Voting on issues became more complicated as the rigged system began offering me candidates that could not depart from dogma on matters that were truly important. They were not only distancing themselves from each other, but they were also polarizing the electorate into opposing revolutionary and uncompromising camps.
A church pastor once told her congregation that if you don’t believe in something you’ll fall for anything. The same is true in politics. It is not solely about the candidate despite all the ad hominem attacks about character and honesty. It’s not about the latest ad sound bites because they are only feeding chum to the sharks and creating enough voter frenzy to get elected. The only way to find the truth is to go deeper and mine for the nuggets of knowledge about how the system should work. Then, allowing that people will probably always screw it up, find someone who will make that happen.
It’s easy to just wash your hands of anything political. It’s harder to try to dredge up the courage to fix things.
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