Rol wrote:
> And, while I do vote, I find it pretty unsatisfactory. Voting is between
> two choices that have been managed so that there is only marginal choice.
> Choosing _real_ fundamental change is not an option. Choosing a new
> direction based on the merits or fairness of a situation is excluded.
To paraphrase another great philosopher (I see Doc has already cornered
Thoreau), "I have met the enemy and he is me." (Apologies to those too
young to have studied Pogo. :-)
I agree with Rol's sentiment, and yet I feel that improved choice could be
there, if we (the people) led the discussion. I behave as if satisfied to
deal with my own life and let the political largely take care of itself
between elections. If enough of us do that, politicians and the media
(who aren't stupid) begin to understand that the way to capture my
attention is to give me something that I will remember in the time I'm
willing to devote to the topic. Those choices could be widely divergent
but internally somewhat consistent, based on significantly different
philosophical tenets (such as the --- largely European --- Social
Democrats vs. their more conservative parties), but, in the US, those
choices seem to evolve towards polar opposites on issues, such as gun
control, where popular opinion (or at least lobbyist support) is bimodally
divided, or indistinguishable from the assessment of the polls, where the
majority opinion (again, or lobbyist support) is pretty well unified. The
polar issues are probably much more complex than we admit, and the
mainstream issues probably deserve more dialog to ensure we aren't
mistreating a smaller part of society which doesn't have the number to be
a leader in the polls. Sherri's case seems to fall in this camp.
As an aside, when I once lived in another country, I learned that some of
the issues we think we understand clearly may have other, quite rational,
interpretations. In the US, I was led to understand freedom to mean such
things as the freedom to buy and build on land pretty much as I see fit
(the freedom and rights of the property owner, which are only somewhat
limited here); in the other country in which I lived, freedom was seen as
the freedom for people to have parks and publicly available lands for use
for re-creation (hyphenation deliberate), even if that meant strong
controls on how towns and cities spread across the countryside and on how
property owners could use their land. In the US, there is a strong
"Second Amendment" belief in the freedom of people to own guns (I admit
that opinions are bimodally divided here, and I don't mean to take sides
nor to indicate my position); there people believed strongly in the
freedom of being able to walk pretty much anywhere they wanted to at
pretty much any time of day or night without fear that anyone could
attack them using a gun. Again, this is not meant to indicate that one
belief is right or one is wrong, but that some of the issues we may
believe are simple can be more complex and may deserve more thought.
The political scene seems made for the concepts of a learning
organization, yet the required infrastructure seems lacking. Lacking that
infrastructure, the costs of weighing in on issues in a substantive dialog
(not debate) seems enough to put me (and perhaps many others?) off.
So, what have people done that is both effective and efficient in terms of
improving the political learning of their country (US --- since Sherri's
issue started here --- or elsewhere)?
Bill
-- billh@lsid.hp.comLearning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>