At some point, during most days I will check four or five political websites. And I'm starting to wonder why I do this? I must have spent what would have added up to weeks reading, debating, thinking about global politics - deploying words like "geopolitical" whenever I got a chance - over the last 7 or 8 years. I think if I was pressed about why, I would have said something like "Well, you know, being informed is better than not being informed." But my being informed led to very little in the way of productive action.
Very often I have a better idea about goings on in places that I will not interact with or affect in any way than I do about things happening in my immediacy. I believe without ever thinking much about it, I have often associated "the political" with a compilation of media that always take place somewhere else. Rachael Maddow is political but Horner Blvd is not.
The abstraction of the political realm leads to political groups, camps, ideologies and other collections of nonsense. The political clique comes prepackaged with opinions, terminologies, and so forth - it is a ready-made discourse that sets the limits of what is thinkable by the terms that are used. These ready-made discourses run counter to my desire to be an individual, whatever the hell that word means in a post-everything world.
But who got to decide that the most important issues I should think about would be abortion, gun-control, and the death penalty. Why is it so important for me to have opinions on these issues to show that I am "informed." I feel much more impassioned by my deep-rooted beliefs that the world starts too early in the morning and is moving too damn fast; I am much more concerned about the manner in which the digital world makes me forget that I have a body that needs to move more. The trick, at least for me, is to see these as political realities - realities that affect me more than my opinion about acceptable cars for people to drive.
I'm starting to believe that what I have considered "political" was something akin to sports for adults - a debate club for people who like to hold "positions."
"sports for adults - a debate club for people who like to hold 'positions'"
ReplyDeleteYES! I often find myself thinking that those who shout the loudest are only playing a game; that they are bouncing the ball back toward their opponent, within the prescribed boundaries, and that their only real conviction is dedication to the rules of the game - not a deeply held, sweated through, worked out belief, but just an automatic response.
I responded earlier to this - but it didn't save. Hmmm. Well to shorten up my last post - I agree.
ReplyDeleteHowever, and this is always my complication - what about the pragmatic voter who says "Yeah I get it - but decisions have effects - and Rush was right "if you choose not decide...." And so forth. Basically: on one level I hate voting - it's soul deadening and makes me acknowledge and advocate a system that I sort of hate. However, one of those two people are going to run, or be the figure head of running the world. I'm not really posing a question as much as just saying - man I'm confused. Hopefully it makes sense.