The Price Is Untenable
Mon, October 10, 2011 at 11:32AM 
Scene: A walk-in clinic in Yonkers. In the waiting area are more than a dozen patients, most glued to their smartphones, as live coverage of a Mitt Romney speech goes unwatched on a flat-screen TV.
Clearly agitated, one of the patients gets up and screams at the receptionist: “Get this crap off the TV,” demanding she change the station to Channel 2.
The receptionist politely declines, saying she can’t just change the channel because others are watching. But the man insists: “Nobody wants to hear this g-d*mn bullsh*t anymore.”
No one in the room speaks up, and the receptionist changes the TV to Channel 2 and “The Price is Right.” Every head in the waiting room lifts up and eyes lock on to the screen, as an announcer shouts: “Valerie, what three words do you want to hear right now? A new car!”
The scene is real and I watched it play out last Friday.
I wish our representatives in Washington would have seen the same. Because vast numbers of people—from both parties—are literally turning off to the issues of the day, because they’ve lost faith that anyone in our government is competent enough to address them.
The price of that kind of public disengagement is far from right. In fact, it is untenable. We can’t afford to have the 2012 election’s “Yes We Can” get drowned out by “Come on Down.”
Reader Comments (3)
I couldn't agree with you more, Frank. Add to that the already difficult task of somehow engaging young people in the election process, and this feels like an even greater problem.
The real problem is that the consumerism of our age has combined with political communications naturally resulting in simple propositions. "Yes we can" is always going to win out over "we might possibly, if it is affordable...and it will probably take us some time."
Democracy is about making choices that are difficult and which the general public wouldn't want to have to make themselves and which many politicians avoid if they can. Since WW2 most of the choices have been simple because growing prosperity and/or the federal credit card came to bestow goodies and vice-versa. Prosperity now has to be earned because the credit card is maxed out. (This is true for the whole western world.)
The idea that the voting box is a consumer dream machine is over. A vote is what it always has been, a mechanism to get a group of citizens to make some broad choices for us all.
Will the media and political classes ever sell this truth? Watch the can bounce down the road. I'll stump up to stop it running away if we get sensible reforms for a sustainable public sector...where's my party?
Great post, Robert. So right in so many ways. The more complicated decisions become, the more people seek simple answers.