We All Have Roles To Play
The opportunity allotted all New Yorkers in the February 5th primaries, no matter their political affiliation, is an important one. Unlike past years where our say in the presidential nominating process came after front-runners were already established, making us a validator of others’ opinions, we will be letting our votes be heard alongside 21 other states… with a real role in what happens at the party conventions next summer. Given the close nature of the big races, this makes for an exciting prospect… that decades of diminishing voter involvement in our elections could start to reverse itself.
But only if you vote…
Chief among topics on people’s minds is the economy. And we’re not just talking Wall Street and currency ups and downs here, but the way our spending on weekly needs, from heating oil and travel gas to food and phone, not to forget healthcare and education, has been jumping regularly while our incomes stagnate. And more and more of the people we know face either job losses or growing worries that layoffs await.
Economic concerns have swallowed our thoughts of the War in Iraq… can we afford it? And our own localized spending needs… Is this the right time to be redistricting our schools? It’s even shadowing that largest of elephants in the room we’ve been dealing with for years now, the Belleayre Resort development.
And yet the economic discussion we need now is not local but national and international… and it involves more than quick fixes in the forms of spending stimuli. We’re sick of being stimulated to always buy more. We want real talk of what we’re all facing, and how the way we’ve been doing things might need to change to make our lives affordable, and less stressful, in the coming decades.
Which are presidential issues…
Sure, there are many among us who have given up hope of real changes. Who feel the whole system is too broken to repair. But does not doing anything, abdicating what little power we do have in the system we live within, achieve anything but more time for leisure, and indirectly more time for spending?
We don’t think so. And in fact, we feel that, given the nature of the presidential race this year, turnout and voting trends tied to next week’s primary, town to town, can say a lot about what we want, as well as have more possible effect than we’ve seen in decades.
So do it. It’s a role we are privileged to play in this nation. Yet also one we rarely get to play as well, or with such key issues at play, as is offered this year.
PS