Just some quick thoughts, here.
No, I didn’t watch the debate.
I did, however, follow peoples’ reactions on Twitter and other sites that live blogged everything. I think that this gives me an interesting perspective, and one that’s probably more telling- and in some ways more useful- than if I would have watched the debate myself. After all, the point of the debates is to woo the common man, and not people like me. It’s to reach the undecided. The apolitical.
My take?
The system is still floundering and failing.
The general consensus seems to be that neither candidate was impressive, or representative of the people- or even of their own constituents.
This is basically what I was afraid of, vis-a-vis Trump, especially. Scanning peoples’ comments, it seems as though he came across like a republican, and not a conservative.
And of course Hillary seems to have come across as a democrat, and not a liberal. But that’s not a surprise as that’s what she’s been all along.
So basically, there’s nothing there that should interest me. Or anyone else not emotionally invested in either party.
When I scanned Twitter hashtags last night, what I saw were people talking about stuff that nobody really cares about, like Benghazi, Hillary’s emails, and completely irrelevant details like what Lester Holt did / didn’t do / shouldn’t have done. What I saw was people talking about what I think are distractions at best, save for those who were rolling their eyes at the whole thing.
What I didn’t see is talk, on Twitter or elsewhere, about the multi-trillion dollar a year deficits the government is running, or about our $20 trillion debt, or about how our currency is failing, or about how we’re going to fix our horrific student loans problem, or about immigration, or about black on white racial crime, or… anything else that people are actually interested in.
Granted, I didn’t watch the debate. Maybe the candidates did spend time on these issues, and nobody on Twitter was talking about it. But… I doubt it. And I think that if they actually did, than that’s almost worse, because their answers to those problems must have been so empty and devoid of relevance that the public didn’t bother to take note of what they said.
Bipartisanship just doesn’t interest me. At 36 years of age, I am too old and too mature for that kind of thing.
Well- at least, this is the case for the bipartisanship of today. Maybe back in the 80’s or 90’s, that stuff might have been fun, or maybe even relevant.
Not today, though. It seems as though our society has outgrown the need for such things. Our problems certainly have, as neither party seems able to actually fix anything.
I don’t know. What I’m seeing and feeling these days is a kind of grim finality to these things. As in, this is the end of the line for the way that things used to be done, and not a start of anything new.
Well, life goes on.
Whether or not the system will, on the other hand…