Better Outcomes Require Your Time
In this, supposedly the season of political discourse, we could do with less “dis” - less disrespect, distortion, distress, disarray, dysfunction …
If voters are going to make informed decisions in Tuesday’s primary election, and in the general election on Nov. 3, they need information, lots of it. Relevant information about candidates and issues. In the best of worlds, voters would go to the polls focused on the relative qualities that respective candidates would exhibit if elected.
People would be drawn to political figures and causes whose ideals and priorities matched their own, whose talents and temperaments were best suited to public service.
Votes would not be cast according to which scoundrel’s path to political power most needed to be blocked.
We frequently hear from defensive voters, however, that there is a scarcity of pertinent information. That the air is filled with slurs, insinuations and half-truths - all underwritten by affluent special interests and masterminded by slick political operatives who specialize in sculpting public attitudes.
This universal lament arises during campaign periods like this one and subsides shortly after the election - a period generally coinciding with the public’s attention span for matters of politics and governance.
Maybe that’s the most troubling “dis” of all - disinterest. Where is the public’s attention when no candidates, yard signs, or sound bites are around to jar it?
Do voters follow issues or just campaigns? And when they follow either, do they avail themselves of all sources of information?
Do they read or watch the news regularly? Attend city council, county commissioner, school board or other public agency meetings? Go to public hearings and forums presented by organizations ranging from service clubs to church groups? Participate in professional and neighborhood groups where public-policy questions are aired? Do they just make time every so often to engage friends, family members and associates in a conversation about the civic issues that matter to them?
Maybe a lot of politicians are charlatans. Maybe political consultants are mercenary connivers. Those accusations overlook a salient point: Attack ads and other forms of harshly negative political campaigning are used, despite public indignance, because they work. And professional political strategists know they work.
If we, as voters, don’t want them to victimize us any longer, we have to stop being such willing victims. We have to invest our time and energy as full-time participants in civic affairs.
We could do a lot worse than to follow the advice of Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman and his wife Rose, in their book, “Free to Choose”:
“The only person who can truly persuade you is yourself. You must turn the issues over in your mind at leisure, consider the many arguments, let them simmer, and after a long time turn your preferences into convictions.”
The key phrase may be “after a long time.” Citizenship is a yearround job.