Well, At Least We All Agree About One Thing.

In the last post, I was talking about the pleas I get by e-mail (etc).  Your preferred candidate is losing in advance polls, so you should donate money.  Your preferred candidate is winning in advance polls, so you should donate money.  The other side is assaulting what's important to you, so you should donate money.  Your side is prevailing in protecting what's important to you, so you should donate money.

And what's the money for?  Advertising.  Or to "lobby" (bribe, pay off, underwrite) electeds.  And why is this important?  Because people are inclined to vote for whoever is most visible (yard signs, mailings, radio or television ads).  And electeds can be induced to take positions, or duck conflicting positions, if someone pays them off.

So, what we all agree about is that most people are either stupid, or they just can't be bothered to think through, and maybe even study, issues.  A shiny object is good enough for most people.  And people who have access to getting money are more interested in getting the money than they are in anything else.

We see a version of that in BP.  (Not the money part, because there is no money -- to speak of -- for electeds/Commissioners.)  But we see people who are entirely out of the loop, having shown not the slightest interest in BP's workings, deciding they should be Commissioners.  And we see BP residents voting for them.  On the basis of nothing.  And in the upcoming election, two of the candidates are incumbents, who have essentially assaulted the Village with emptiness, disinterest, and incompetence.  But they'll get votes, too, if for no reason than that they're already incumbents.  The last time I ran for Commission, in 2020, Judi Hamelburg was running.  I encountered a number of people who said they intended to vote for her because they personally like her, or because she's their friend.  Yeah, I personally like several of my neighbors, and I consider them friends, too.  But I wouldn't ask them to treat me for a medical problem, or to fix my car, or the plumbing in my house.  Of course, it's easy to bypass even friends and people you like for things like that, because you have to have formal training, confirmed expertise, and a license to do those things.  But you don't need anything -- not anything at all -- to propose to be a Commissioner.  And there are plenty of people who will take that bait.  Sometimes, all you need is not to be so-and-so, or to be thought of as an outsider, so you're thought not to be what some imagine is an unthinking, or corrupted, part of the system.  It's sort of like the less you know, the more confidence someone might have in you.

And what replaces knowledge, experience, and proven commitment is exposure.

So here we go again.  We're in a no-win situation.  We might re-elect two incumbents who have shown us some of the depths of disinterest and incompetence.  And even if we do make that idiotic mistake, we're still going to get one other person with minimal experience and connection to the Village and how it runs. The best we can do, which is not great, is Jonathan Groth, who at least has participated in the Foundation for a year.  And he's not a particularly active participant.  The rest of them?  Excuse my French (I know it's not French), but who the fuck knows?  If they campaign, which they might or might not, you'll at least find out what they look like, and hear what they say.  But there's still nothing behind it.  Did I call them pigs in pokes?  Yup.

On another, and tangentially related, note, I just finished one book, I've just started another, and I read stuff on my homepage.  It turns out we humans are mindlessly and foolishly destroying this planet, and everything that lives on it (except maybe cockroaches and palmetto bugs, which are amazingly resilient).  We distract ourselves with cheap and processed food, and to get it to be cheap and processed, we wipe out forests, which wipes out various kinds of plants and animals (including, perhaps most importantly, the top level predators, as well as balance), and we flood the environment with pesticides, fertilizers, and monocultures.  But according at least to Philip Lymbery's Dead Zone: Where the Wild Things Were and other sources, this approach makes the land less, not more, productive, and it causes horrible mistreatment of non-human animals, which are decreasingly healthy themselves, and which are what we want to...eat.  It also causes the soil to be of poor quality (some of this material was discussed several years ago by Michael Polan in places like The Omnivore's Dilemma), and the poor soil plus the run-off of excess pesticides and fertilizers gets into streams, rivers, and oceans, and destroys animals and plants there, too.  (Yeah, I know, discarded stuff, including plastics, and oil spills, do plenty of damage, too.  You're right.  You do take reusable bags into the grocery store, right?)

But the overarching idea is the same: people can't be bothered to investigate and think through matters, which is why visibility, exposure, other shiny objects, and novelty almost just for the sake of novelty, are so effective.  It's why we damage our broader and narrower environments (the earth, and BP) for the benefit of people who don't know what they're doing, and aren't interested beyond their own personal and time-limited (no one lives forever) interests.

So I hope our neighbors who want to be Commissioners (whatever it is they think they want out of that) campaign, and if there's wheat and chaff, I hope you're effective in separating them.  The easiest choice you can make, because you don't even have to guess, is not to re-elect the incumbents.