In Which Dave Misses the Point of the Whole Election
I haven’t just been AWOL from blogging for the last few months – I’ve been pretty quiet on the political activism front as well. I sort of took the opportunity of the election being over to say, “OK, I’ve done my hours of data entry – you go ahead and take the whole Oval Office thing and start fixing this mess.” Intellectually I know that this is inconsistent with my own beliefs about democracy and inconsistent with the bottom-up theme of the Obama campaign. However, if you combine the outrage deficit I’ve talked about before with the fact that instead of working to convince citizen voters, the activist task at hand is to convince elected officials with their own bases of power and their own agendas, I start doing a little cost/benefit analysis on the time/effort front and start to wonder what I can really do beyond my work as a teacher and writer.
However, that doesn’t mean I should be totally inactive, so I’m resolving to try to make good use of the summer to improve on both of those fronts. I may even take a crack at adapting my thesis to see what Deweyan reformers can learn from the election of 2008. Hard to believe it was just three years ago I was working quotes from some first-term senator’s memoir into that thing . . .
About Dave Thomer
Born and raised in Philadelphia. Studied philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx, where I made many great friends and met my wonderful wife. We moved back to Philadelphia, where I studied philosophy some more and became a teacher. Online and off, I'm looking for ways that we can be better citizens and build stronger communities.