Gum-flapping 2010

Nothing bores me more than sitting through political commercials during an election year. And on top of those, signs on every street corner and countless stories on the evening news about politicians and the election. Sure, it's big news and will be the most prominent topic for the next two months, then the wrap up for another month.

Tonight, I listened to a news interview on Walter Cronkite's network. Katie Couric interviewed several people that were unemployed in Ohio. They discussed the tremendous loss of jobs in the state and how these people viewed the election in November. As they spoke it seemed to me they all danced around the issue. Sure the economy stinks, jobs are scarce and the country is in debt up to our eyeballs. They all touched on these topics to an extent. The Democrats want to do this and the Republicans want to do this. However, no one addressed what I believe the real issue has become.

Perhaps I'm just late to the party, or it has taken fifty years for me to see the light, but the problem isn't the economy or jobs or any other one thing. The problem we have is a group of elected officials who are more interested in pointing fingers at each other and getting re-elected than anything else. We now face as turbulent a time as nearly any in my lifetime. Not since the threat of the cold war and the civil rights era has this country faced problems of this magnitude at one time. But instead of rolling up their sleeves and putting aside their differences, life rolls on in our elected capitols with nothing of substance accomplished. They may claim otherwise but I believe that is the perception of the public.

We elected these persons to solve the issues of our times and yet they either can't, or won't. We hear platitude upon platitude and then get legislative bills so massive to be voted on that no one has the time to read them, let alone decide what the consequences would be. And lets just tuck a passage into the health care bill about building gopher damns in Minnesota or some other such nonsense, and we'll figure out how that affects us after we pass it, along strict party lines.

It's coming close to a time when we do away with the party system and force everyone to run on their own merits. God knows we couldn't do any worse. It's time the politicians actually do the job they were sent there to do; work for the people that elected them. We'll never have a perfect world but this is ridiculous.