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=> Just Don't Give a Shit

Just Don't Give a Shit
Posted by Tony (Guest) - Sunday, May 30 2004, 8:26:37 (CEST)
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I agree that there is now greater potential for 'change' than there
was a few years ago. But the problem I see is that the vast majority
of people is uninformed and disengaged from politics and from social
and political issues generally. For this reason the kind of public
opinion (on issues) that emerges through polls and structured surveys
is meangless, i.e., because people don't know much about the issues
they appear to have opinions about. So if you ask them to explain why
they oppose 'welfare', for instance, they demonstrate that they don't
know anything about it. If you change the word welfare to 'government
assistance to poor people' you get a majority on the other side of
the issue. If you put the question about government assistance after
a question about crime, support drops 15-30%. If you ask fictive
questions about 30 % consistently offer an opinion. So polls and
issue- survyes are increasingly mood driven rather than opinion
driven; people's opinions on a broad range of issues are
(increasingly) impressionistic rather than well-thought out. This is
why, in my vew, they fluctuate as they do, often wildly, and why they
never predict anything other than the kinds of behaviors Wojtek
refers to: consuming and voting. None of this is to say that Bush
won't be voted out of office. Rather, it's to say that if he's voted
out it'll be because his policies are obviously 'not working' and
because the pundits and opinion leaders have turned against him. It
won't be because people understand what his policies are about, or
that they've re-evaluated the substance of those policies --
regressive taxation, imperialism, etc. They might feel, in other
words, that Bush is really not 'for them' without knowing what it
would it mean to be for them. Whereas, wealthy people know that Bush
is their guy and that, in order to be elected, he has to appeal to
the masses (thus appearing to be not for them). They are engaged,
informed, and active. We need social movements, then, not only a
vehicle for more meaningful change than what can be achieved through
elections, but also because these build relationships, networks,
resources, and serve an educative (or consciousness raising)
function. In other words, if change is to mean anything, beyond
periodically pulling us back from total destruction by getting rid of
an exceedingly dangerous president (Bush is not the first), then
people need to be involved in this change.



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