Apathy is the Enemy

It is certainly easy to blame Republicans for the mess we find ourselves in with regard to who is in control of the government.  We have seen a steady erosion of Democratic support over the past couple of decades as the Republicans have systematically and methodically gerrymandered voting districts and supported the creation of voter ID laws and other obstacles to voting by the most vulnerable of our citizens. Then there is the resulting creeping absorption of our statehouses and governorships fostered by this slow moving tsunami of Republican influence.

The result of this conservative wet blanket over our democracy has been an erosion of what most Americans believe are fair-minded ideas on all manner of actions and decisions that would benefit the vast majority of citizens. 

Why has this happened?  How is it, for example, that the current Health Care ‘compromise’ being created by Senate Republicans in a back room somewhere without any debate is possible? 

The men and women who have engineered this kind of reprehensible action have been installed there by ‘US’.  Who are “US”?  “US” is the voters of this great land. 

And therein lies the problem, my countrymen. We are apathetic!  Liberals are too disengaged to vote.  Republican conservatives are not.

From the New York Times this morning in an editorial by Dave Leonhart:

“Last year, Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 voted for Clinton over Trump in a landslide..  Only 43 percent of citizens in that age group voted, however.   By contrast, Americans over age 65 supported Trump — and 71 percent of them voted. Similarly, Americans in their 30s were more likely to support Clinton, and less likely to vote, than those in their 50s.

And the gaps grow even larger in midterm elections. A mere 17 percent — 17 percent! — of Americans between 18 and 24 voted in 2014, compared with 59 percent of seniors.

The country’s real silent majority prefers Democrats, if only that majority could be stirred to vote.”

So I ask you, who are the real laggards?  If you examine the position of the majority of Americans on issues like health care, gun control, minimum wages, abortion, the environment, climate change, and a myriad of other challenges, you will be amazed to see that the MAJORITY of Americans take progressive leaning positions (more than 50%) on all these issues.  And yet, our elected officials take contrary positions in service to corporate masters and their own sometimes puritanical view of life in this country.  How did these people get to where they are to be able to steer our nation in these directions?

The simple answer is that we have been too lazy to direct our own destiny.  To reverse the course we are on as a nation means that we all must take more interest and more action—in the form of VOTING---to change our direction.   Data from the 2016 Presidential election shows that over 100 million people(almost half) who are eligible to vote in the U.S. didn't vote.  There is the answer!

Unless we as citizens get up off our indifferent asses, nothing will change and in fact it will probably get worse.

There is another more insidious reason we are so apathetic.  We are not teaching our children civics any more.  Our educational system is not teaching our kids how our government works and how they can make it work better.  When you can go onto a college campus and find a majority of students who can’t tell you what the three branches of government are, how many senators there are, or who is the President, or how many states are in the union, or what year we gained our independence from England, or what the Civil War was, we have a more fundamental problem.

Apathy.   That is the curse we must remedy.  Otherwise we are on a slow but relentless downward slide to ……..what?