So I’m standing in line to vote Tuesday and I hear a female voice behind me explaining how she made her voting choices saying, “I only look at the .orgs; the .coms are all biased.” Shocked, I turned around enough to see she was a twenty-something blonde in sweats and running shoes talking to an older matronly looking woman. My first thought was to say, “What are you; stupid or something?” I stifled that and said, “Oh, I knew you had to be blonde to make a comment as stupid as that one.” Okay, I didn’t say that either, but I wanted to.
This is how we elect someone as unqualified and decidedly incompetent as Barak Obama to a second term. All economic indicators are worse now than when Obama was elected in 2008. More people are unemployed and more on government assistance than during the Bush years. Our foreign policy is in a shambles. Think assassination of ambassadors and shooting at drones in international air space. Obama has commited to the public record more lies than the prevaricator-in-chief Bill Clinton, yet none of this information is making it to the blonde twenty-somethings who have voting rights. I wonder if the founding fathers’ idea that only certain select people should vote has merit.
The real problem is the media environment and education system we have fostered in America. Our education system no longer teaches the skill of critical thinking. We spoon feed answers to pre-selected questions. This is what I find my students in college expecting from me. The concept of coming to an answer through a process of reasoning is completely foreign to most of my students. Combine this with a media culture that feeds disinformation or outright falsehoods in attractive, entertaining packages (The Daily Show, for example) and you have a recipe for a misinformed electorate.
I typically don’t go in for conspiracy theories. I was not behind the movement to prove Obama was not born in the US, although I still wonder why he couldn’t provide a birth certificate. I know exactly where mine is. I didn’t agree with the critics who claimed Obama was a secret Muslim, although I know from his policies and pastors he is not the kind of Christian I am. No pastor of mine has ever said, “God damn America.” The bottom line is that it does not take a conspiracy theory to see that the media deserves at least part of the credit for Obama’s reelection. Common sense says that his record should have doomed his reelection from the beginning. But since the media did not allow his true record to be shown, the voters like the blonde behind me in the voting line did not see the whole story and couldn’t vote on the facts. Add to that her misconceived idea that moveon.org is not biased.
Was it by some coincidence we didn’t learn about the President’s failure in the Benghazi affair until after the election. Why is it that the fiscal cliff everybody talks about won’t be dealt with until after the election. The so-called auto bail-out by the President will never be shown as the government take-over it was because the media won’t tell it like it is. The loss of religious liberty hidden in Obamacare won’t make it to the public consciousness. Each of these unwritten stories remain because the major media outlets are infatuated with Obama.
It was Thomas Jefferson who said our republic would not survive without an educated electorate. I am afraid we have reached the point where survival is unlikely. If there are many more like the blonde behind me in the voting line, we are doomed. I suspect I am late coming to this conclusion; we just reelected a man who had no business being President in the first term. That he was reelected proves there is a cliff behind us worse than the so-called fiscal cliff ahead. It was the educated electorate cliff, and we have already flown over the edge.
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