Political malaise and election season
For the last couple of weeks I’ve had fragmentary political posts
buzzing around my head. I never know how much to write about politics
in this space. It’s not that I don’t care, or that I’m not paying
attention. It’s more to do with genre, really. By and large, I
don’t feel at home writing in the style and rhetorical stance of the all-politics-all-the-time political
blogs. But periodically, like now, I find myself thinking:
how can I post about nothing but my regular topics at a time like this?
Isn’t that just ignoring Current Events?
Which in turn prompts a "what, precisely, is a blog supposed to do?" internal
debate that usually results in my shutting up, because really, aren’t
there a zillion others out there already making the
arguments I’d be making, and what use is a "what they said," anyway?
And then you think about the public personas you cultivate on- and
offline, and the disclaimers you have to issue about how you’re
speaking as a private citizen and your views don’t necessarily
represent those of anyone else associated with you, and so on.
And when you turn on the news and learn that the president now has the
power to declare someone an "enemy combatant" for vague and nebulous
reasons, and that such people can be held indefinitely without the
right to face their accusers, and you
start thinking about what this implies — well, what can you say? It’s
at once too big to talk about and too big not
to talk about. (It occurred to me recently that a fair number of "How
do we know the world we live in will still be recognizable in a few
years’ time?" thoughts have been creeping into my head lately. I don’t
think I’m alone in this at all.)
So instead I’m going to write about what you can do, concretely,
when you feel like you have no say in what your government is doing.
Dr. B got me started on this train of thought by asking "So what are you going to do about it?"
To her list of suggestions, I’d add volunteering to get out the vote
next month. I’m also thinking about doing a class project on the information-seeking behavior and information needs of voters, because it can be really hard to find out where candidates actually
stand. For starters, there’s Project Vote Smart, the League of Women Voters, Open Secrets (find out where your candidates’ campaign contributions are coming from), and, for people hereabouts, the Committee of Seventy’s election information site. I’ll post more links as I find them; I may also post some thinking-out-loud about education and citizenship, depending on how busy I am cramming for midterms. (Exams, that is, not elections.)
This internal debate seems all too familiar.
I’m especially reticent to comment since I taught high school for so many years and didn’t feel it was appropriate to discuss politics with my students.
Still, I suspect that I’m going to sound off some on my site in pure celebration of the fact that I’m no longer teaching and I don’t have to feel those kinds of restrictions.