A Canadian friend of mine, Kevvy Schlauch, has an online magazine called Love is Wonderful, and he wrote a terrific piece I wanted to share with you, with his permission. It is written about Canadian politics, but I'm sure many of us can relate.
http://www.loveiswonderful.com/ - check out the rest of the blog/magazine, there is some fine writing, mostly from a Canadian perspective.
"I'm beginning to draw the conclusion that democratic politics is a system of trying the public's patients[sic], and then doing whatever you want to do."
- more -
"An example:
Earlier this year in Canada, the big scandal was the Gomery Inquiry and the Liberal Government scandal that included millions of tax dollars being misused. As a country, we were literally one parliamentary vote away from a forced election, an election that would have come four years earlier than expected.
Seemed like a big deal then. Politics was a passionate issue in our nation.
Now it looks like the Gomery Inquiry (which is on-going, but gets less and less press every day) will be delayed. The reason this is significant is that the Liberal government promised an election as soon as the inquiry was finished. This was a compromise they made that helped them avoid that forced election I mentioned earlier. But now, no one who doesn't draw a fat paycheck from tax dollar doesn't seem to care.
Our existing government knew that Jane and Joe Voter (the folks like you and me) would eventually get on with our regular lives after such a heated political debate gripped the country, and we did. The scandal that came within millimeters of dissolving our national government now gets tucked away in the back pages of the papers. A debate that I was so involved with both by expressing my opinion in this magazine and by taking action with a couple of political parties has also moved to the recesses of my interest. Politics triumphs over me again!
I guess this is a system I should have picked up on sooner had I not been so obsessed with issues and agendas. In times of controversy or outrage, politics is just a system of delays and pauses to manage the public until their (our) attention spans latch onto something else. We can't be blamed for being human, right?
So now that I'm aware, how does someone like me, a regular Joe, continue to be politically active? I haven't the interest to become a politician, so I can't commit the amount of time the pros do. It's already obvious to me that simply "talking politics" with friends and associates does nothing but either offend people or show you how narrow-minded or outright naïve some people can be. Either that or you get a group of people like the People's Judaism Front (or was that Judaism People's Front?) in The Life of Brian.
So when I realize how small I actually am I fall back on the words of Joe Strummer.
"So I ask myself what I've got, and I find that I have a dollar bill in my pocket. So I'm going to vote like that. I'm going to shop locally - that's how I'm going to use my dollar bill - as a vote."
In other words, I'll start by trying to secure some very small victories for myself before (or if I ever) decide to go big. If it was good enough for that Joe, it's good enough for this Joe."