Today, roughly half of the eligible U.S. citizens will exercise their right to vote for favored candidates. Unfortunately, some number of these choices won’t be based upon any examination of the candidates’ voting records. The ballots aren’t likely to support those candidates who actually tried to help our country work its way out of a global depression. Instead, the votes will go to whomever slung mud the thickest, or whomever had the best sound bite, facts be damned. What happened to the informed electorate?
A recent Bloomberg poll shows most Americans don’t know how the economy has expanded following the latest depression. They don’t know that the Federal government will be paid back for what it invested in the banks. They don’t even realize that their taxes have gone down. And yet, these citizens who will vote against “the man,” because television tells them that they are worse off than they were two years ago.
In aligning themselves with the Tea Party, some percentage of these citizens consider themselves American Patriots. Unfortunately for most of them, it’s nothing more than uninformed hype. These “patriots” claim that Moses wrote the US Constitution or that the founding fathers never supported the separation of church and state. The dream of fiscal responsibility is lost in a sea of falsehoods and slander.
In today’s Information Age, it should be trivial for citizens to look up information from multiple sources, and come to informed decisions on what is best for them and the rest of the country. And yet, it seems that the American populace has gone in the other direction — depending on mass media to spoon-feed them factoids that even an elementary student could refute with a simple web search.
Americans, please prove me wrong. Educate yourself, and cast an informed vote.
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