When the Rubber Hits the Road

Many people will argue long and hard about everything that is wrong with society -- and what everybody else could do differently, and then when given the opportunity to do something, think that it is enough that they’ve convinced everybody else to do it -- and so they don’t have to do anything themselves.

That is the essential problem of society, culture and government -- that everybody thinks their only recourse is to convince somebody else to do something -- and they themselves cannot, or it does not matter what they do because everything they do is futile. The unions and other coercive forces would have one believe that one is nothing and powerless without them -- and so the individual expressing his own thoughts is invalidated, in the thinking that only the union president or the official spokesperson of an agency can speak for all of them.

One sees that same mentality in the newspapers, and especially in the letters to the editors, reaffirming their belief that only the governor or any elected official has the power to do anything -- which is the problem, and therefore, every human problem becomes a government one, rather than an individual one.

An election is not a test of whether one makes the “politically correct” choice, but that they express their choice to the best of their ability. So now that the politicians have done their work, it is up to the voters to do their work.

It is not the work of the politician to do one’s thinking for everybody else; that’s a big mistake that leads to tyranny -- which is always that kind of a slide into not being able to tell the difference -- between the real and the phony. That is the simple choice -- deciding between the real and the phony, because essentially, it is a matter of trust in one's own judgment, and not who is “politically correct” by the measures somebody else tells one.

The most important task is to determine the general quality of thinking of the individual who will be representing one -- in most of the matters one doesn’t want to have to attend to personally. But when one is the leading authority on the matter, one must rise to that challenge and responsibility. And when everyone does just that, the world works remarkably well -- better than one person making all the decisions for everybody else.

And that’s why from time to time, we have elections -- so we never forget that powerful lesson. But it should not be co-opted by the powers that be who wish to permanently entrench themselves at the top of the hierarchy.

Don’t just vote because you’ve seen the name and think you therefore “know” the person because of all the propaganda techniques they’ve employed. Ask yourself, is this a thinking person -- and how do I know that?