I’m watching the vice presidential debate with fourteen other students. Every time Sarah Palin opens her mouth, someone makes a joke.
They quote something they saw her say in a video clip on YouTube. They imitate her using a bad northern accent, sounding more like someone with a cold than Sarah Palin.
Every bit of wit they interject feels like déj… vu, like something someone emailed me a link to last week. I want someone to say something in defense of Sarah Palin’s policy. Or against it. It doesn’t matter. I just want someone to step outside of the box we’ve created by failing to think for ourselves. But I’m no better. I sit back and listen, not brave enough to have my own opinion.
I’m not defending Palin. I’m opposing the fact that trends in popular opinion on politics seem to be as rampant as trends in fashion. It’s like this: you see your neighbor in a fabulous black pea coat.
Some gorgeous brunette modeled the same style on the cover of the “Vogue” that came in the mail today. You run to Macy’s and buy one without inspecting the quality of the stitching, without considering if it’s really warm enough for those cold nights in December.
You hear your neighbor say Candidate X is the most qualified for the presidency. Some white-haired intellectual expressed the same view in the op-ed section of your favorite newspaper this morning.
You run to the polls and vote for Candidate X without inspecting the quality of his or her policy, without considering if Candidate X can really take this country in the right direction.
There’s a reason the founding fathers didn’t want this country to be ruled through direct democracy. As a mob, we don’t know what we’re saying when we talk politics. We’re not experts on policy though sometimes we’re experts in repetition. Like parrots we imitate the talking heads.
People bandwagon. We are chained to the positions of our friends, the mass media and the blogosphere.
It’s nothing new. Take a look at McCarthyism and the Red Scare in the 20th century. The movement was founded by a few and pushed by the masses. We’ve always been afraid to think for ourselves. If the majority thinks it’s correct, it must be, right?
Thanks to technology, our constant connectedness and ability to rapidly communicate, we are required to think for ourselves even less.
There are a million voices feeding us our thoughts. They come from editorial pages and blogs, YouTube videos and Facebook status updates.
When people discuss politics, they’re regurgitating what they read in “The New York Times” or “The Huffington Post.” Our own opinions are a collection of other’s views. A “smart” person will pick and choose.
Why aren’t we smart enough to create our own opinions from the primary source, the world around us?
This world of technology and communication can also give us the resources to synthesize our own viewpoints. If we quit being lazy, mustered up some courage and switched on our ability to reason, we could sort through this muddled, mound of information and form our own opinions. Then, if we were really brave, we could act on them.
This is the first election many of my friends and I will vote in. I hope that when we step into the polling booths (or mail in our absentee ballots), we’ll have the guts to step away from the crowd and fill in the bubbles based on our own opinions. This isn’t the CSAP or the ACT. There isn’t a right or wrong answer, but it may be the biggest test of our lives yet.
Laurelin Kruse (lbkruse@gmail.com) of Alamosa is a freshman at Yale University.
