Driving Votes: Kate's Blog - Archived Entry

An object at rest tends to stay at rest and an object in motion tends to stay in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force. Objects tend to keep on doing what they're doing... The same could be said for people.

Our political views are assuredly shaped a great deal by our surroundings- most people have a tendency to simply keep spinning along, exerting only enough energy to maintain and not enough energy to careen off in a different direction. We can only hope that there will be some excellent collisions in the next 6 months.

We are tailored to our news sources, attracted by what makes sense to us in our own particular world view. (I know I am guilty for taking Harpers always at their word. I also don't think I have one friend who is a registered republican.) How many of us read Aljazeera for our coverage of the Iraqi war? Probably only Noam Chompsky, but then he reads the New Republic too as well as 800 other sources. What I am basically getting at is: we all need to question staus quo & in so doing we may find that even our accepted truths are worthy of a stinging critique from the other side. I think that liberals can be exceptionally guilty of holding false assumptions- just as can conservatives.

I feel like this sort of human inertia is something that governments have been exploiting since there were first governments. They expect us to be lazy. They expect us to believe what they say, and not figure out for ourselves where the truth lies. Most important of all they don't think we'll have the power to organize.

I say come on people. Lets have it out. Get loud damn it.

I am sick of GWB + his cadre of folks who consist of a nearly self-sustaining unit of power, operatives, and oil. They stole an election and turned it into a right wing conservative mandate- not to mention our disasterous (an understatement) foreign policy. Secondly, we have a House that is at fault for getting their redistricting done by DEEP BLUE --talk about inertia, this has reduced the possiblity of a competitive race and real dialogue to almost nil.

By teaming up with Driving Votes- and making a trip, I'm hoping to stir up both my own stasis and the stagnant state of our democracy. The hardest part is the rally to the cause, and the beginning of the movement. But, I just want to say that already through speaking with folks who are organizing around the country, I can sense the beginnings of a groundswell.

I am also psyched to get out there and meet people who are living across the country. To hear directly from them what their concerns are unfiltered by any particular source...