A common theme running throughout many passions is that it often only takes one illuminating experience to become an ardent, lifelong devotee. Just one bottle of a divine wine to become a "Sideways"-style oenophile. Just one powerful movie, and you're a film buff for life.
Politics is no different.
Just one event is all it takes -- one flick of the light switch -- to reveal the political world for what it really is: something of the utmost importance of which we all must be involved.
For me that switch, that bottle of wine, was the Iraq war. Whenever anyone is foolish enough to suggest that "it doesn't matter who becomes president; it doesn't matter which party's in power," all one need do is point to the Iraq war for the most glaring, obscene example.
If Al Gore had been elected president, we would not have invaded Iraq. The neoconservative lust for Saddam Hussein would have had no influence in a Gore administration. It's that simple. Unknown thousands of Iraqi civilians would still be alive, 1,500 of our troops would still be alive, and we wouldn't be empowering Osama bin Laden by unnecessarily inflaming the Muslim world against us. We would not have broken international law nor set the dangerous precedent of pre-emptive war, a doctrine that now any country can invoke. And we would not be robbing future generations by driving our country further into debt.
Of course the coin flips both ways. For Republicans and conservatives they can bask in the fact that had Gore been elected, that murderous butcher Hussein would still be in power, filling his mass graves. On a side note, we'll just ignore that uncomfortable little fact that Hussein was able to rise to power because of our support of him and his bloody acts in the 1980s under that god of conservatism, Ronald Reagan.
Hence my primary political interest has always been foreign policy -- specifically trying to support policies and candidates who will result in the least amount of unneeded death as possible. So local and state politics, while admittedly important, tend to take a backseat. Sorry, but debates about daylight-saving time, legalized gambling machines and a new Colts stadium just do not seem as pressing as, say, outsourcing torture and officials making the case that the Geneva convention should not apply to captured terrorists.
But this importance of politics is something painfully obvious, isn't it? Aristotle said politics was the master art because it has the power to control and dominate over all other arts.
So why the apathy? Why are young people especially so detached?
There are many clich� reasons for these oft-asked questions. The one I've hinted at perhaps holds the most weight: Many people simply have not yet connected the dots between one candidate's victory and the resulting unknown number of wholly avoidable deaths.
The situation grows even more complex when we consider non-war related deaths. Almost all other policy decisions can be ways of killing people more slowly, whether through allowing contamination of the environment, ignoring the millions without health care or failing to respond to the genocide and AIDS crisis abroad.
Politics is a dangerous game in which the pieces are human lives. It's time to start playing instead of forfeiting our turn yet again by not getting involved.
Write to David at
swimminginbrokenglass@gmail.com
http://www.bsu.edu/web/dmswindle
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