I have been reading quite a lot - just none of it for preparing for the course I'm teaching this fall. Trying to wade through a backlog of magazines and keep up with the newspaper.
One of the articles I read (in Mother Jones) was talking about blogs and the internet and politics, and I found it interesting that basically most political blogs are run by white men and that the internet's role in politics basically reflects what happens in the outside world in politics in the USA - most energy and power is focused around white men, with women and minorities playing a very peripheral role. I know that while politics interests me, the time constraints of being a working mother mean that I don't have time to go to a bunch of evening meetings to keep up with what is happening in city council meetings. Let alone any political party meetings or caucuses. And I do not have cable (saving money while I save our brain cells) so I can not watch the recordings of meetings. And the reality is that the minutes of meetings, when they are available on-line, leave out much of the nuances and nitty-gritty that you get when you go to meetings in person.
I wonder if I would approach things differently if I were in a country where it felt like politics had a vital role in my life. I think politics have a big impact here, but my life is so cushy here in the USA that I wonder if it allows me to put politics on a back burner. Or is it that politics is such a huge bureaucratic animal that there is no sense of how I can have an impact. Sure I write my senators and congress people (usually email them), but it always feels like my voice doesn't really count. Either they will do something I agree with - because they would do that anyway, or they do something I DISAGREE with - which is also what they would do anyway. While I appreciate all the nice letters and emails to me from their aides, I can't say that I feel like my voice really has an impact.
And as far as local politics is concerned, where you think you could have a real impact, people seem to feel even more disconnected, or if they aren't disconnected, they are small-minded and vituperative. Which is not about to make me want to get involved. Life is too short and the issues they are up in arms about seem meaningless when I look at the big picture.
There are not really any open doors that invite people into the process. I have seen the way that outsiders get treated - like they are annoying or irrelevant, or to be appeased to their faces and talked about behind their backs, or just out and out ignored. Or they give you the round-around: "that's not in our jurisdiction, it belongs to so-and-so"... with everyone just passing the buck (or the hot potato) because they don't want to invest the energy it would require to do something meaningful.
And I get very angry and frustrated with the lack of visionary people in local politics, and that is NOT good for my blood-pressure, so I'd rather put my energy in other places than to bang my head on a door that seems to already be closed and locked.
But am I making a big mistake?
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