| From the Sidelines |
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| Wednesday, 19 November 2008 00:00 | |
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I feel isolated. Left out. Watching. Not a part of society. As someone who can’t vote, be elected to anything of note, affect the economy, or even live away from my parents, I’ve started to question things from the safety of this small little mountain town in which I live. In many ways, I’ve begun to imagine myself as someone watching a soccer game from the sidelines, yelling at the referee for bad calls or perceived bias. As I watch our economy unravel, the war in Iraq escalate, and the election unfold, I’ve found myself becoming more and more vocal against what I think of as poor judgment, strange behavior, and, in some cases, plain old stupidity.
And I don’t think it’s just me. I see others around me talking about the same things, and I’m sure all of us are wondering how the decisions of the present will affect us—those who will ultimately feel the full force of society’s blunders and missteps. Just look at the election. Whichever candidate wins, his policies will shape our lives drastically. And all we can talk about is how someone who served on the same board as a candidate used to be a terrorist forty years ago? Or that someone cited that being close to Russia is foreign policy experience? That certainly seems against the point to me. I seriously don’t care if Barack Obama is Muslim or not. The question I ask is, is he going to improve the country that I live in so that my children will want to live here? Or even improve the country so that I will want to live in it? I know for one thing that I don’t want our country to be repaying our debt for decades to come. I don’t even pay taxes and I’ve already begun to worry about passing down this huge debt to my children. That isn’t right. They, and I, shouldn’t be paying for the excesses of the previous generation. When my dad started working in 1971, the national debt was less than 1 trillion dollars. Now it’s over 10. It’s obvious that I won’t be getting the same kind of opportunities and services that my parents did, and I’ve come to accept that. What I don’t want to accept though is that the next generation will have even less services and opportunities than I have. As it is, I’m very much content to watch the election and other current events from the beautiful isolation that is Lake Tahoe. I love the feeling of sitting in my armchair at home, fireplace blazing and making snide comments at the TV. It just seems that all of the issues that plague our country are taken at face value and no one analyzes the long term effects that my generation will have to pay off. In the end, I think I’ll keep watching this game from the sidelines. Sean McClelland is a Hamiltonian Federalist and dreams of becoming the world’s first professional “armchair analyst.” |
