The dreaded sequester went into effect a few days ago and so far, no planes have fallen out of the sky, the Republic hasn't collapsed and life seems to be continuing per normal- for me anyway. Yet the paralysis of our government continues. The ineffectual policy making, the inability to do anything other than duck the hard choices seems to be the governmnt that we get these days- and while it's fun to beat up on Washington D.C. there's an argument to be made that really, we do it to ourselves. After all, we vote the bums in- why do we get outraged when we realize that they're actually doing anything other than spending money faster than a teenage boy in a strip club?
I'm not sure voters know what they want. And I don't think that's a phenomenon confined to the United States anymore. Israel still doesn't have a government formed. (Netanyahu was graciously given two extra weeks by Israeli President Shimon Peres to try and seal a deal- he's had four so far.) Italians were so irked and the prospect of technocratic austerity that they elected to try paralysis instead. No one seems to want Bunga Bunga Berlusconi back in charge and the New Democrats on the Left don't have enough seats and the Five Star Movement lead by Comedian Beppe Grillo wants nothing to do with anybody. (Though Grillo gets some props from me... Conservative blogs seems to see fascism lurking in the corner but if anybody's wondered what it would have been like to have George Carlin form a political party, run for Congress and actually win seats, now we know, albeit in a slightly crazier, Italian kind of way.) There are darkly ridiculous rumors of a military coup in Spain, fascism is on the March in Greece and Hungary, voters in Eastleigh in the UK beat the Conservatives into third place behind anti-EU party UKIP and nobody knows whether Scotland or Catalonia are going to have a Europe to be independent in at all.
Citizens of the western democracies seem to be in a truculent, disgruntled kind of a move- probably because the problem that stalks our land isn't necessarily income disparity or rich people being dickheads and keeping all the cash, it's fundamentally simpler than that: people want things from the government, but they don't want to pay any of them.
Square that circle, kids and you could have quite the career in politics these days. I think about these problems and I have no answers. It's one big fishpond that we're dealing with and if you drop a rock in the center, the ripples bounce off everything in one way or another and the whole problem gets complex and chaotic and then it becomes suddenly easy to realize why nobody seems to know what they're doing. Yet at the same time, someone has got to roll up their sleeves and get to work. We can't be bound by old ideologies or tired ideas anymore- and that goes for the left and the right. I don't give a damn about ideology or principles- all I care about are results.
If politicians want my vote, it's real simple- look at the mess we're dealing with and then actually do something useful about it. That will impress me.
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