Soapbox time...

I just saw a post on Google+ that got me all riled up. It was an image of Obama and Romney with the caption "If you vote for either man, you vote for more WAR." It's essentially urging people not to vote. I can't let this go unanswered. So I'll be going up on my soapbox for a while here.




True, the system is not perfect by any means. But as for this election year, it is the way it is. Not voting is tantamount to saying "I have no say in this government, so therefore I will not complain about the consequences, nor celebrate them." I will never understand where, in a country where we actually have the freedom to influence our government (regardless of whether it is not as much as some might like), people don't take advantage of their rights as citizens. There are some people who talk a lot of bloated ideals about how the country is all wrong. Then, when the time comes to actually change things by voting, they don't even do it. 

But I believe that voting alone is not enough nowadays. The media is so biased in their coverage of so-called "news" that often, the candidates are picked for us. Images are smeared by those in a position to influence what we see, and too often we let them be. I think what we should do is *get involved!!* We need to write letters to our congressmen, our representatives and tell them what we want done in our government! Because it is not THE government, it is OUR government. I think we have failed to remember that fact.


When we don't get involved with our government, we are really giving the government free reign over our lives. Take congress for example. Congressional spending is at its highest point since WWII, when, at its peak, the government spent 53% of the country's Gross National Product. That means that over half of the wealth of this country was going into the war effort. Now the government is spending approximately 45% of our GDP, meaning 45% of the country's wealth is being spent. On what, you may ask? There is no World War on right now, no threat so grave to the United States that every one of us is getting involved in the effort. So why does our government need to spend so much of our money? That's something we need to keep them accountable about. 


And nowadays, maybe writing our government officials is not enough. One of the greatest influencers of public opinion is the press. We should be getting involved in that as well. We could be writing our local and national news services about keeping their objectivity in covering the news, especially when it comes to picking the stories. Too often stories of great magnitude are ignored by the mass media because it doesn't fit in with their political agenda. Well, news services are not to have a political agenda, and I really believe we can fix that. If we can boycott a major news network to share news that we feel is very important, and then write to them WHY we're boycotting them, I believe we'll see a change.


So all this to say, I don't think the solution to changing the way things are done in our government is to not be involved. Quite the opposite! We should be involved in OUR government. After all, it is a government "by the people, for the people".