Suppose you threw an election … and no one came?
Suppose you threw an election … and no one came? This week that was pretty much the scenario with only the library issues on the ballot. Oh, I know, it’s high summer and we’re a little busy barbecuing, boating and beer drinking to squeeze in the time to mark an absentee ballot, put it in an envelope and mail it in. More than half of us 15, 600 residents couldn’t find the time … or the stamp … or didn’t care enough to vote on a library levy.
About 1 in 5 of us voted to approve the new library. About 1 in 6 of us figured we didn’t need a library in this post-Gutenberg computer era. And most of us had more urgent issues to occupy us this hot happy August. I don’t know, short of offering up social media as a way to vote, how much easier we can make it. No more polling stations, no more ID checks, just mark a ballot and send it in. I mean, c’mon, do we have to vote on Facebook to get folks interested???
I heard we fought the Iraq War to bring American style democracy to Saddam’s dictatorship. Rumor has it we want the same in Afghanistan after the Taliban took over and let Al Qaida use the country as a terrorist base. You ask me — and I know you’re too busy right now to bother — we ought to fight for a little democracy here first. And if we don’t give a damn enough to vote, to exercise the fundamentals of what democracy really means, then we ought to quit our yammering about those poor oppressed countries that need our intervention to help set them free. It’s us, the pathetically apathetic, that needs the intervention.
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