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the moral disconnect

November 10, 2004   

i know that it’s not that simple for most people, and that many people don’t understand the full repurcussions of what they are voting for, but i thought it captured the idea pretty nicely.

sometimes, i wonder if people are just naïve… perhaps the average person does not understand what the role of the president is? i don’t mean to excuse people who don’t understand; i just want to first try to figure out what is going on with them. i remember that as a child, i thought of the president as sort of a king that gets to have that position via a popularity contest, like you had the be the “best person” or “most well-liked person” to be prez, then you’d rule over your kingdom. and at a slightly later part of my childhood, i thought the president was the representative of your country to the world, but i didn’t give a thought to the actual practical governing aspects of things. i wonder if there is a significant bulk of people who vote in this country that believes that (1) the president is just your country’s spokesmodel; (2) that bush is a “good person”; and (3) that they want a “good person” to represent us. i have no idea. i mean (1) is sheer ignorance in the literal sense, (2) is due to either reception of purposeful misinformation or perhaps some sort of a cognitive dissonance due to preconceived notions of the man, and (3) is… actually kind of child-like and sweet, except that this isn’t the president of your grade school classroom, and (1) & (2) are so totally wrong!

hrm. i’m going to say that there can’t be that many people that fell under this umbrella. i was just trying to figure out a way to preserve my ideological belief that in general people aren’t inherently evil and aren’t voting to oppress others, but perhaps it is i that is suffering from cognitive dissonance, as there seems to be plenty of evidence to the contrary. that makes me very sad.

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