Facing Our Irrelevance
No one cares what we want
What do we want? It would seem that is a question that should be both primary and foundational in the political process. I can’t remember ever hearing that as anything but a rhetorical prompt from an American politician to tell us what we should want.
More often, we are told what we don’t want. In the first case, that is a range of things that will make select other people more affluent and more powerful, and, in the second case, will make certain select other people are denied what they want.
In neither case is there any concern for what we, the mass population, want. Occasionally, we see the results of a survey on that open-ended question, including things such as national healthcare, free education, and employment security.
The responses are labeled as unreasonable or just not possible in America. After all, we are irrelevant in the American experiment’s final era. Our role is only as secondary markers in the Electoral College tabulation that may be zeroed out.
In the critical election year of 2024, the changes in what we think we will do (not what we want) are pored over daily by the knowledgeable. This is the arcane art of reading survey entrails by poking and prodding them, producing prognostications solemnly stated to be worthless this early in the election cycle.
