Siliconchef by Brian Richardson

Election Follow Up

In the wake of an election where more people voted against somebody than for anybody, I bring you the following analogy – choosing a meal on an airline.

Some people may remember when airlines used to serve an actual meal in coach … well, it was like a meal, but without the quality. So you’re in this metal cylinder with a bunch of people you don’t know (or particularly like) and you have to make a choice between two mediocre items.

“Chicken or beef?”

Now you’ve seen chicken and beef before, but you can’t actually look at the chicken or beef until after it’s served … and if you choose one you don’t like, you can’t select again until you get on another flight.

Perhaps you’ve had beef or chicken on this airline before. The chicken wasn’t good last time, so I’ll get the beef. But the beef isn’t terribly good. You’d like to send it back, get another selection …but not on this flight.

So we got chicken or beef this time … one wasn’t good, and we can’t send it back, so we’ll order the other one this time and hope it’s really better. We can always try to get fish on the next flight.

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One response to “Election Follow Up”

  1. Jeff Avatar
    Jeff

    Brian:
    You have very creatively summed up the main reason I get so discouraged about national (particularly Presidential) elections. I have found very little reason to feel excited or to get behind a candidate that either of the main parties has put forward in the last several years. I’d be angry, but that would imply that I have some idea about how to fix it.

    It’s not that I expect to find a candidate whose views perfectly match my own. I’m not that silly. However, one of the parties is so busy pandering to the far extreme on practically irrelevant socio-moral-religious issues, that they can’t seem to focus on what’s actually happening to the country. The other, apparently in an effort to be so inclusive that they don’t scare anyone away, manages to produce candidates who seem incapable of taking a strong stand about anything. I actually like to have some sense of who a person is before I vote.

    The very idea of political parties (particularly the almost complete exlusion in the US of any but the main two) just peeves me. At the same time, I can’t imagine the chaos that would result if we didn’t have some kind of organizing “filter” to narrow the choices and focus the financial support. I have no desire to choose among 150 different candidates for a single office.

    The only thing I know to do is what Brian did: vote for the 3rd guy when there is one. It’s why I voted for Nader in 2000: in the hopes that he would get 5% and thus get some funding for the third guy the next time around (that, and it was the only way for me to keep my vote from getting lost in the sea of Bush votes in my state). It didn’t work that year, and it doesn’t seem to be going much better since.

    *sigh* I don’t appreciate defeatist attitudes, so I’m frustrated with myself for being frustrated, but the brilliant idea hasn’t come to me yet.

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