power to the people

"It won't make any difference."
-----------------
"Are you going to vote?"
"No." (patiently, firmly)
"I'm going to vote."
"It won't make any difference" -- that was a man I work with, who can talk as he keeps walking, away from me, down the hallway and be twenty feet away, & talk without turning his head, & somehow I can hear him. It's as if the words, which are being spoken away from me at a steadily increasing distance, are floating back toward me.
(Maybe he's a sort of ventriloquist -- "throwing" his voice.)
...He isn't wrong, but he isn't entirely right either.

Another man at work said he wasn't voting because the whole process is to give us the illusion that we "have a say" -- well yeah it's an illusion if you don't Go Down To The Polls (!)
No, really I know what he means and he's not completely wrong or entirely right.

Nothing I voted for passed!
Batman didn't win -- (back to the Bat Cave).
No seriously -- some of my votes turned up winners. Not the ones I was most interested in.
(And then our local paper, front-page headline this morning, announcing that one race was as yet "to close to call."
Everyone makes mistakes, but geez -- two years ago they ran a headline about Blagojevich referring to him as the Governor of Chicago. - !

Medical marijuana didn't pass.
(The heck with those cancer patients -- let 'em suffer!) I think that's awful.
What if we legalized marijuana across the board, for anybody? Anybody over 18, or something.
Could create a new industry. Think of the funds we could raise, taxing it. And -- create jobs for tobacco and liquor lobbyists.
Wouldn't it help the economy?

A man I knew who survived Japanese prison camp during WWII used to say, "One problem with democracy is that the voting process is based on the assumption that nine idiots are smarter than one genius."
As with the people at work who tell me "it doesn't make any difference" & "it's an illusion" -- I could not think of an argument for the "9 idiots" point. But I still would never want to live in one of those countries where you can't vote and they've got a dictator.

I may change the title of my novel from
"Wondering About The Questions Of My Time"
to
"The Education Of One Idiot."

-30-