Election 2012

I mentioned to a few close friends that I was completely uninspired, unmoved, and de-motivated by this election, and they reacted with surprise, for they felt it was exciting and important.

For me, it seems like the last five years of political discourse have been numbing and mundane.

It seems like every public discussion, every political debate, is petty, and is about nothing more than an argument over money: who should have more money, who should have less, whose taxes should be higher or lower.

This started all the way down at the local level, as the election for the school district in my town was about nothing more than the city's parcel tax revenues, and whether they had been used to give the administrators an outsized raise.

And it continued at the state level, where the major propositions on the ballot were about whose taxes should be raised or lowered.

And it persisted all the way to the national election, where the debates were almost solely about debt, deficits, taxes, and spending.

I don't understand why there aren't people debating issues that seem truly important to me: how do we reduce conflict over religion, and over race; how do we end these seemingly endless wars; how do we make sure that people around the world have enough to eat, have clean water to drink, have a safe place to sleep and raise their families; how do we solve the problems of drug wars, of gangs, of ghettos and youth violence; how do we move away from policies that put millions of people in horrible dangerous prisons for trivial reasons, turning minor miscreants into hardened criminals; how do we stop polluting the planet; how do we arrange to bring new scientific discoveries to the people of the world?

All this bickering about money and jobs and taxes just seems so mundane and selfish and ordinary, when there are so many more important things that people ought to be discussing.

So that's why this year's elections just left me cold and drained and listless about politics.

I don't mean to bring everybody down, just wanted to write on my blog a bit about it.