Again as someone who has been totally into politics since I was like 8 years old (I know, I was a precocious child who informed my parents of the news), I don't understand the VAST majority of people who see politics as a topic of interest like history or sports or home improvement. And I feel smug in my knowledge that politics is everything.
But 42 year old me would tell 8 year old me that most people have jobs, lives, and "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" to get to and not just watching boring fucking news and speeches by Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell on VHS tapes or pouring over volumes of long dead economists and political philosophers in the school library. There were baseball cards to trade and bad ones to put into bicycle spokes to make it sound like a motorcycle (I literally ran with a group of kids that pretty much was The Goonies back then).
So my old smugness sort of fades as I realize not everyone looks at the world like I do. But reality dictates that everything is downstream of politics. And politics, as we have learned, are downstream from culture. It becomes important, whether you like it or not. We can depend on the nerd kids like me deciding what is or is not important to really follow, or we can all get involved, with the understanding we can all be covered in bullshit at the drop of a political top hat, and stop the more stupid stuff from happening.
Basically we had like 60 years of nobody really engaging at all. Basic civics went from a major study in every school to a minor pastime most could skip in that time frame. And only now are people awakened to it, because, as you said, we are being forced to.
Unfortunate, but inevitable. I take no measure of satisfaction from it. I'd rather go back to the time when watching the weather channel and cable news were simply guilty pleasures, not deciding the fate of my children.
Again as someone who has been totally into politics since I was like 8 years old (I know, I was a precocious child who informed my parents of the news), I don't understand the VAST majority of people who see politics as a topic of interest like history or sports or home improvement. And I feel smug in my knowledge that politics is everything.
But 42 year old me would tell 8 year old me that most people have jobs, lives, and "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" to get to and not just watching boring fucking news and speeches by Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell on VHS tapes or pouring over volumes of long dead economists and political philosophers in the school library. There were baseball cards to trade and bad ones to put into bicycle spokes to make it sound like a motorcycle (I literally ran with a group of kids that pretty much was The Goonies back then).
So my old smugness sort of fades as I realize not everyone looks at the world like I do. But reality dictates that everything is downstream of politics. And politics, as we have learned, are downstream from culture. It becomes important, whether you like it or not. We can depend on the nerd kids like me deciding what is or is not important to really follow, or we can all get involved, with the understanding we can all be covered in bullshit at the drop of a political top hat, and stop the more stupid stuff from happening.
Basically we had like 60 years of nobody really engaging at all. Basic civics went from a major study in every school to a minor pastime most could skip in that time frame. And only now are people awakened to it, because, as you said, we are being forced to.
Unfortunate, but inevitable. I take no measure of satisfaction from it. I'd rather go back to the time when watching the weather channel and cable news were simply guilty pleasures, not deciding the fate of my children.
C'est la vie. We will win in the end.