I am experiencing a strange, disquieting sensation. I feel disconnected somehow from my environment, the way a person might feel after suffering a job loss, the sense that my services are no longer needed. I know why this is so.
It's been a month since I have been asked to vote on anything - anything at all.
No overheated TV commercials threatening the end of life as we know it if this or that passes or fails; not a single kilogram of daily hit-piece direct mail fliers impugning the integrity, patriotism, intelligence, and sanity of those opposed to the viewpoint hyperbolically espoused therein.
No bulky envelope with an absentee ballot, accompanied semi-contemporaneously by a thick pamphlet with page after page of yes-ons and no-ons carefully crafted by such a burgeoning army of spin-doctors that I am moved to wonder if we have gotten to the point where spin-doctors have their own areas of specialization like other doctors.
"Oh, I'm sorry, I don't do appeals to bigotry, I only do flag-waving; you'll have to see a bigotry specialist, but I can write you a referral. There's a guy in Beverly Hills, huge practice, does marvelous work."
This is California; why is no one asking me to have my opinions (carefully considered and completely uninfluenced by slick TV ads paid for by phantom out-of-state ideologues) on, well, everything, tallied up and made into a law or better yet, a Constitutional Amendment to add to the half a thousand of those we already have?
Should state legislators be allowed to use parking meters near the Capitol for free when the Legislature is in session and they're late for a floor vote, but only if they drive a Prius?
Should school children younger than 12 be required to obtain written parental permission before using the term "same sex marriage" in any conversation on school property? Should Jay Leno be designated the official State Comedian?
Shall the State set aside $300 million for programs to aid left-handed paraplegic veterans whose self-esteem has been damaged by global warming?
I mean, I'm good at this stuff - we all are. The mystery is, why do we have a Legislature at all? Anything they can do we can do better; we do it all the time, and unlike them, we don't cost a dime.
All we need is some kind of committee to sort through and collate every question and bright idea that more than, say, eight people think is important - I don't mean eight people on the committee, I mean eight people anywhere - and divide them into a series of ballots for special elections to be held every few weeks. Then we can actually have what a truly depressing proportion of our civics-challenged citizenry thinks our system has always been: A direct democracy.
Yes, good old, in fact ancient-fashioned democracy. Let's hear it for Athens, Pericles rocks! - although it must be said that when the Athenians did it the first time it didn't work out all that well.
While it was definitely cheaper not having professional, full-time, highly-informed legislators who studied issues and consulted experts and went through lots of steps before deciding stuff, having the power of the vote lodged exclusively in the general population (meaning white men with a certain minimum amount of money; some things change very slowly) resulted in a lot of decisions that would make your teeth curl.
It turns out that especially when freaked out by any sort of serious situation the Athenians turned rather quickly into a herd of sheep easily manipulated by agitators with their own agendas who used antiquity's equivalent of fear-and-smear ad campaigns to propel the gullible into voting for stuff that was on occasion so downright uncivilized that Dick Cheney himself would have had serious qualms, briefly, before approving.
Ah, but that was Athens. Those folks didn't have the time or the background to understand the consequences of what they were voting on; they were easy targets for outside influences who played on their fears and prejudices with well-crafted propaganda. They didn't know it, but more often than not they were puppets on strings.
We, on the other hand, are Californians. Night and day.
Despite being an award-winning columnist, Robert Mitchell doggedly remains the same eccentric attorney who has practiced general law in Morgan Hill for more than 30 years. Reach him at r.mchl@verizon.net
Robert Mitchell
Robert Mitchell Despite being an award-winning columnist, Robert Mitchell doggedly remains the same eccentric attorney who has practiced general law in Morgan Hill for more than 30 years. Reach him at r.mchl@verizon.net.
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