Game-Changing the
Conversation of Politics
My favorite coffee shop is
my favorite because the coffee is good and nothing weird ever happens
there. Now I’m going to have to find a
new one. Yesterday morning, two of my
fellow regulars who appeared to be old friends, changed the subject of their
friendly conversation and went through a rather theatrical transformation.
-
One levitated and began croaking like a demon.
Naturally, the topic the subject had changed to was
politics. When finally un-possessed, neither of their
positions had changed an iota but they had managed to throw cold water on their
normally warm relationship. The exorcist
transformation they experienced is completely typical of what happens between
the closest of friends and family. Small
wonder that “never discuss politics” is so high on Miss Manners’ etiquette
list.
One of the reasons The End Run Project exists is to reframe and challenge the idea that we-the-people
should be unable to calmly discuss and analyze what our elected officials and
public employees are doing. It is our civic
duty is to hold public servants accountable for how they spend our money and
how they wield the force of government with which we have entrusted them. Yet it has become the nature of politics that
instead of evaluating their performance we are constantly turned against one
another, gnawing, stabbing and belittling each other over the latest media
hysteria or meaningless, politically generated “issue”.
- Mitt Romney’s dog took a kennel ride on the roof rack.
Really? That is the kind of trivial, brainless
excrement that we are supposed to concern ourselves with? At the risk of sounding paranoid, I suggest
that it is in the best interest of politicians and their parties to keep us focused
on such rubbish so as to distract from their very real shortcomings as
legislators and administrators.
“The whole aim of practical
politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to
safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them
imaginary.”
-- H. L. Mencken
The idea that we can achieve
civility in our political discourse is not a pie-in-the-sky impossibility. Future posts will describe a methodical
approach that anyone with a scarecrow brain can learn and use. The pay off will be our ability to focus
clearly on our employees’ performance in Congress and the bureaus of the
executive branch. If we don’t care enough
to hold them accountable, they will use our political system to further their
own ends. Here’s how we put our
collective foot down: disrupt the dialogue with an end run.
“No one will really
understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to
solve our problems. They are trying to
solve their own problems—of which getting elected and re-elected are number one
and number two. Whatever is number three
is far behind.”
—Thomas Sowell.
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