confessions of a nonlinearmind

If the choice is to be politically aware or ignorant, I’ve decided to choose ignorance

My New Year’s resolution: to spend the year as politically ignorant as I possibly can.

I’m fed up with politics. Healthcare, terrorism, the economy, employment, etc. I’m tired of it. I spent hours volunteering for Obama, I tried to rally people behind the public option, and I called several representatives. I’ve been let down by all three.

Our president has taken on too much, and produced very little. People behind the public option have been shouted down by the ignorant right, so much so that it is significantly influencing policy. Calls to my representatives were pointless, because I ended up speaking to office staff who already had their talking points memorized.

I’ve been thinking lately that politics should not be interesting. It should really be quite boring. Anyone attempting to make it interesting, specifically the 24-hour news networks, is just personality peddling. To go on the air and actually, faithfully cover policy and the goings-on in government would be a ratings killer. It would be C-SPAN. It would be Congressional Quarterly. But it’s not. It’s four hours every evening full of commentary and spin and guests who are on five minutes to talk about a complex topic, usually concluding when the host says something like, “I’m sorry, we need to cut to break. We’ll have you on again sometime and discuss this further.”

They never do.

Someone once said that Washington was Hollywood for ugly people. It couldn’t be truer. The Washington Post and the Washington Times are our People Magazine and Entertainment Weekly. USA Today is USA Today.

In the end, what is accomplished? The average person, average person, has no role in legitimate political discourse anymore. You’re often a foot soldier to special interest groups on the right or the left, spewing the outrage that they tell you to, under the guise of being a “grassroots movement”.

I don’t need it anymore. At one point several years ago, around the time we were ramping up for war against Iraq, my father, a lifelong conservative, and I got into a heated debate over politics. That year I didn’t come home to visit for Christmas, the only time in my life I hadn’t done so. My sister passed away suddenly three days later. I never got to see her that last time. Since then, my father and I have reconciled and pretty much have discussed politics rather civilly. But I’ll never forget what toll it took on our relationship and how we could’ve been spending so much time talking about much more interesting things.

And now we do. It’s been a long time coming, and it’s the beginning of a new decade. I expect many great things to happen for me and the people around me over the next 10 years. I don’t plan on wasting any more of it on the sport of politics. That’s my New Year’s resolution.