We’re all familiar with them. And in these days of the 24 hour news cycle, we’re bombarded with them every day. And worse yet, they’re taking over. Taking over our media, taking over our conversations, and most alarmingly, taking over our government.
They are polls. No, not Polish people — polls. Surveys. “Measures of public opinion and/or sentiment.” And they have emerged as the single greatest threat to our society and our way of life.
You know what I’m talking about:
• 23% of adults in Texas believe President Obama is Muslim
• 34% of Americans believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone
• 60% of Americans believe in UFOs
• 84% of remaining Republicans believe Rush Limbaugh cares about someone other than Rush Limbaugh and his pharmacist…
You get the idea. So how, or why, you may wonder, do they pose such an ominous threat?
Funny you should ask.
Polls presumably break down even the most complex of issues into one and two digit numbers. And when it comes to numbers, polls have shown us that the population can be broken down into three distinct segments:
1. Those who are impressed by them
2. Those who are intimidated by them, and
3. Those who believe that putting small pieces of cubed fruit into Jell-o was the greatest idea of the 20th century
But who are the actual people behind these numbers? A typical poll about political and social issues takes an average of 10-15 minutes to complete. This might explain why a recent, informal straw poll of this author’s personalities revealed that those who take the time to participate generally fall into one of the following categories:
• Shut-ins (or, ‘recluses’, depending on economic status)
• Inmates
• Those who believe that putting small pieces of cubed fruit into Jell-o was the greatest idea of the 20th century
• Assholes
And speaking of the latter, this is where the socio-political threat to our nation comes in.
In spite of, or more likely because of, the consolidation of news sources, the media explosion of the last 20 years has created a generation of ‘gonadally-challenged’ politicians who also apparently fall into the ‘intimidated by numbers’ segment of the overall population. As a result, they have, for the most part, lost sight of the fact that they were elected by their cons uents to go to Washington and learn (with the aid of large taxpayer-funded staffs and all the resources of the federal government to assist them) about the complex issues that the voters don’t have the time and/or inclination to study, and then, exercising the trust placed in them by those they represent – hence the term ‘representative democracy’ – decide for, and on behalf of those cons uents what they think is in the overall public interest. It is not ‘elitist’ when a politician claims to know more than ‘Joe Six-Pack’ about the economy or foreign affairs or the health care system; it’s a sign that they’re doing their job. Any of them who can honestly say they don’t should be dressed in a wolf costume and dumped in a vacant lot adjacent to an Alaskan heliport.
What’s happening instead is that rather than doing their jobs and risking alienating the four groups of poll-takers in their district or state, they use the poll numbers as a form of referendum, and their costume instead becomes that of a sheep.
The result of this poll pandering, unless the trend is reversed, will inevitably lead to an economic meltdown, or worse. Letting polls dictate policy is tantamount to government by referendum, and government by referendum doesn’t work. This is not a slight on the American people, it’s just common sense. We, as individuals, don’t have the time necessary to allow it to work. Representation, under our system, means electing people to make decisions for us – not one-person one-vote on every single issue. Remember, it’s the American people who, in their inherent wisdom, adopted this form of government in the first place. To continue down the legislation by referendum path we are currently on can only end in catastrophe.
… And if you think this all sounds alarmist, just remember one word: ‘California’.
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