2. Demand Better

Came across this link a couple days ago:

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/taliban/funding-the-taliban

What the article basically says, for those of you who didn't feel like reading it, is that a lot of the money that funds the Taliban is coming from the same NGOs that are trying to rebuild Afghanistan. Their money comes from the government, who, as you know, gets their money from... well, you.

So here's the deal: you don't demand enough from your elected officials. They make promises, you vote them into positions of power (i.e. positions that give them control over the spenditure of your money), they break their promises, and you... complain about it. That's not good enough. You deserve better from them, but you're too stupid to go after it.

Complaints don't work; opinion polls don't change anything. Case in point: before the 2004 election, the national news kept showing polls stating that a large number of Americans would vote for George Bush, but would want him to do things differently in his second term. Bush, for his part, ran campaign ads stating that he would do things the same way as he did in his first term. People voted him in anyway. He did things the same way he had done them the first time. The public's opinion of his work dropped. Nothing changed; he kept doing things the way he had done them the first time. Do you see where the incongruity is?

Politicians don't actually care about what people think of them. You have to be that way in order to succeed in politics, because your opponents will say anything about you to make people not want to vote for you. Whether it's your city councilperson or the President, they have a singular goal; receiving your vote. So, rather than actually care about what you think, they spend vast amounts of time, money, and energy making it look like they care about what you think. Now, most of you are too jaded to actually believe that they care, but you're also too lazy to go through the effort of demanding better out of them, or demanding fundamental changes in the system. So you vote in the same kinds of people, and they do the same kind of work, and you get more and more jaded, and at that point hearing news stories about how your money is funding the same people that are shooting at your country's soldiers makes no difference to you. You're too numb.

So think about this for a second: there are two groups of people that are paying the price for your apathy in this situation. The first group is the military, that is, the actual soldiers on the field; I don't think I need to explain that any further. The second group is the rest of the people that the Taliban is killing or otherwise hurting, oppressing, etc.: the locals. They didn't ask for that kind of life; they didn't ask to be born where they are, just like you didn't ask to be born American (or wherever you are that you have access to some guy's blog).

So what's the fix? How do we demand better from our government? How do you make sure that your laziness doesn't beget the laziness of the people that are supposed to protect us, thus letting your money slip into the hands of people that are supposed to be our enemies? Simple: stop voting for the same people.

Sure, there's nothing inherently wrong with writing letters to your elected officials; the oft-forgotten First Amendment right is the right to petition the government to redress grievances (i.e. fix the stuff they did wrong). Unfortunately, not enough people want to expend that kind of energy, and I'm afraid that if I simply tell you to get off your ass and do the work yourself, you'll stop reading. But voting is easy. You spend too much time watching TV in the first place, so you see your share of political ads. Listen to what the politicians say about themselves and not what they say about each other. Vote for the one that promises what you want, and if s/he doesn't deliver-- this is apparently the tough part-- VOTE FOR SOMEONE ELSE. One lie is all it takes. Vote for someone else.

You deserve better than being lied to by someone who doesn't care about what you think. You deserve better than having people take your money, spend it in another country, and not think that you'll care if they let some of it go to terrorists. Just stop being too dumb to demand it.