Apolitical
Mood:  don't ask
Now Playing: Better Days - Goo Goo Dolls
Topic: Politics

I like to consider myself fairly apolitical. When people try to engage me in political debate, I can get pretty passionate about my apathy. And it's not that I don't care about people or issues; it's just that I don't think government is equipped to deal with most of them.

Liberals always seem to say that conservatives don't care about the poor, and a lot of folks would consider me conservative. But I volunteer at shelters and devote my time when I can. I believe in that. What I don't believe is that it's the government's job to take care of it. The government makes laws and then can't afford to pay police officers a decent wage to enforce them. Governements can't afford to pay teachers what they're worth. They can't even issue me a driver's license without a mile of red tape. And they're seven thousand trillion dollars in debt. And this is what we expect to feed and house the poor?

It's hard to get people to volunteer their time for shelters and transitional programs. I know. And yet people expect the government to care.

So I don't get excited about anything political and I don't believe that any politician or leader or personality can change the world. And I think that's a good thing, because almost anyone who ever made any real change in history did so by blowing things up or killing people. That might seem extreme, but really, how is any one person, given our current political system, going to affect any substantial change?

I guess I just don't think it really matters who gets to be President or who hold the majority in Congress. If I could make any real change in the world, it wouldn't be the kind that a politician could make anyway.

Like, my 11 year old son said to me yesterday that commercials always wanted to convince us how unhappy we are, which I thought was pretty insightful for an 11-year old, especially when he went on to say that it's probably really hard to sell things to happy people.

Folks always seem to want more, and want their kids to have the newest things, and so they work more to get more and in the end so much time has gone by that they wind up with nothing.

That's what I would change, if I could.