I read in The Daily Dispatch that registration time to run for local elections is fast approaching.
It begins on Monday, in fact, and will run until Friday, July 17.
There are nine positions open for election on the Henderson City Council. To be specific, eight council members and one mayor.
I had forgotten about it, to tell you the truth. After all the mishegass of the November election, the collapse of the economy, and the nearly all-consuming fear that my GM warranty will be voided by the bankruptcy, I find it hard to believe that we’re in for another. Hey, it was only yesterday that Minnesota finally elected it’s other senator, Al Franken.
What it is about Minnesota, anyway? Do fermenting cheese fumes drifting over from Wisconsin give off a hallucinogenic gas? Wrestlers, comedians…
But I digress.
The problem is that once the major-market Madison Avenue national election advertising campaign dies down, we forget all about representative democracy. We’re bombarded with so much information about the forest’s grizzly bears that we don’t notice the doings of the squirrels and chipmunks and the occasional polecat. It’s the wee creatures in our own neck of the woods that make up the landscape of our local political life, after all.
Politics is kind of like a Monet painting. If you stand far enough away and look at the whole picture (national level), it blurs together in a way that makes sense; at least, you think you understand it. When you get close up and examine that square inch closest to you (local level), you find that each individual brush stroke is pretty damn close to incomprehensible chaos. So you back up again to a point where it becomes coherent again.
(My thanks go out to Alicia Silverstone in Clueless for her help in developing the above simile.)
Or maybe it’s like moving paving stones around in the yard. You know that if you pull one up, something unpleasant is bound to be crawling around underneath it.
Or maybe local politics is like sausage. No one really pays that much attention to what’s in it until it starts making people sick.
It’s not that we’re lazy or stupid, necessarily. Historically, it’s just been hard to access the information we need to understand what goes on in the local political arena.
We’ve also gotten cynical. Never has the attitude of “you can’t fight city hall” been more pervasive. And that, I think, is a dangerous attitude. If we can’t or won’t exert influence over the government we elect and fund, how can we ever hope to overcome our challenges around the world, challenges mounted by people we neither elect nor pay for?
Ignorance is no longer an excuse. The Internet in general, and Home in Henderson locally, has shifted the information paradigm of the world and our city. I take some small satisfaction in having provided a forum that has added more light to the sum of light in our little corner of the universe. In short, the information is out there.
Whether you’re New Direction, Old Direction, Right Direction, or Wrong Direction, it’s time to get out there, get vocal, and get active. If you like your mayor and your council members, get behind them. If you’re ready for a change, stand for office or find someone who will and support them. Take your ideas to the marketplace and see if anyone else will buy into them. As times get tougher and resources become more scarce, we can’t afford to be complacent.
Don’t just live in your town. Own your town.
HiH is an excellent place to start, but if the journey doesn’t end in the polling place, then you haven’t reached your destination.