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Difficulty Maintaining an Election

By Gloria Diaz

Check out Gloria's Blog — Edge of Gloria!

Fort Wayne Reader

2010-12-19

Despite reconnecting with some old friends (Hi Lorie!) and feeling more comfortable at work with my funny, nice co-workers, the recent election has me feeling more depressed about the future than ever. Republicans and most Americans are impatient that eight years of waste and nonsense wasn’t magically fixed in two years’ time, but honestly, do you really think Republicans are going to perform miracles in the next two years? Because they think they can, I’ve been urging them to hurry up on my Facebook page. Why wait until you are sworn in? Get your asses in gear and start fixing the country now dammit!

Anyway, I was online when I saw a news blurb that caught my eye. Seems that George Dubya says the worst point of his presidency was not Hurricane Katrina, or the mess of cleaning it up; it wasn’t 9/11 and his blank-faced stare of “holy s%$# maybe I SHOULD have read that terror warning” while in a classroom reading to kids; instead, it was Kanye West saying he didn’t care about black people. Thousands of lives lost in a wasteful war, a devastating hurricane, the worst attack since Pearl Harbor, and he’s upset about someone saying he doesn’t care about black people. Wow. It’s true what they say: C students really do run the world.

I’ve toyed with writing Bush a nasty letter just so I can have “closure” as they say in the world of therapy, but would it really do any good? Idiots run for office, because they are the only kind of people who WILL run for office. And yes, I remember that I did run for city council a few years ago. I never should have done it, and I deeply regret that.
I attended training for work a few weeks ago and one phrase stuck with me. That phrase was “decision matrix.” Seems that one of the trainers had a problem getting her daughter dressed each morning. The daughter would choose one thing, and the mother wanted another thing. So the mom choose five outfits from which her daughter could choose, making her little girl think she was one up on the mom by choosing her outfit. She was too young to realize mommy was rigging her choices ahead of time.

And our choices are rigged too. But just like the rats in the lab experiment, we keep pushing the button, knowing we are going to get a pellet. We keep pushing the button in hopes that one day, instead of getting a grass-flavored pellet, somehow we’ll end up with the banquet pellet; the one with the appetizer, entrée and dessert.

This election won’t change things. That’s my prediction. I’d like to see a revolution, but it will never happen. We’re too apathetic for that. We like the pellets. I assume one day, we’ll learn to love the shackles, as well. And we’d better, because they are coming.