PERSONAL RESPONSE 5: WINNER TAKES ALL
The second thing that seems odd to me is that winning by a percentage point means that one side or the other has free rein to do anything they want to do. No matter who wins we are still 50/50, bitterly divided. But neither side can permanently win if we keep shifting back and forth. It means that even when winning there is the realization that in two years or four years everything can be reversed and that most of the time we will have disfunctional government no matter who wins. This may be a way of keeping the tensions of the game high, but it seems a terrible way to live together. It really doesn’t matter whether you win or lose an election because it will be reversed the next time around. Democracy is almost a balancing game with the only advantage being that we can always right the balance the next time. This is a great way to gin up excitement and tension but a terrible way to govern ourselves. Only when we are threatened from the outside in a war do we pull together or when disaster like Helene strikes we all support each other in disaster relief. There was a huge outpouring of goods and money and volunteer workers in Marshall, a city politically divided, after Helene, demonstrating how we could get along if we wanted to.
IRRATIONAL EXUBERANCE
A third thing I wonder about is in this game what determines how we vote. It almost seems to be as irrational as my choosing the Dodgers over the Yankees. It doesn’t seem to be policies that matter, even though we justify our vote by pointing to policies. Our vote seems to be based as much ihn on tribal allegiance and deep seated primal emotional drives as on knowledge of the facts or actually trying to figure out how to solve our problems. The ignorant who have never given politics a thought are as qualified to vote as a person who has thoughtfully figured things out for himself, on either side.
The political operatives on either side and the media on either side spend their time figuring out how to enflame our primal feelings and blind us to thinking things out for ourselves. They are determined to manipulate us to be on one side or the other. I know because my email is filled with posts trying to enflame me and make me feel part of a larger tribe that will make me feel significant. When I sit wildly cheering for my team along with a tribe of other people I feel good.
Winning, being right, seems to me as much a problem as anything else. It makes a great game but it can also cause great pain and unpleasantness. Winning, insisting on your rightness, seems more important to do on an international or national or even a state level, while on the community level where we know everyone winning is less important than listening to and supporting each other. So winning a 50/50 election leaves us still 50/50. There must be a better way.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 