Political enthusiasm half-hearted in US

Last Saturday on TV One, CNN contributor and host of TV One’s Washington Watch, Roland Martin, moderated a live TV special called “Measuring The Movement.” It was an event designed to not only talk about the issues in the African-American community, but what steps are African-Americans going to commit to, in order to fix these issues.

At one point during the event, Martin asked the audience how many of them supported the president during his 2008 campaign for election. Almost all of the hands in the audience went up, and there were cheers and applause all around. The next question he asked was, how many of them attended a health care town hall last year. About one third of the audience raised their hands and the level of enthusiasm had dropped significantly.

The thing that bothered me the most when I saw this was not that these people had been apathetic about health care, it was the fact that what I saw on TV was a small snapshot of a much larger problem we have in this country. Why is it that we only care about politics and public policy issues when election time comes around?

Millions of people every week will tune into all types of silly reality shows, but how many of them take time out to watch a daily White House press briefing or a floor debate in the Senate? Furthermore, which of the above could impact their lives in years to come? I don’t expect people to watch channels like C-SPAN all day but there is no reason why people don’t have a basic knowledge of what goes on in their government. When I tell that to people, many will say, “Well, it’s so boring to watch that stuff.”

The decisions these politicians are making have the ability change every single thing we do in this country. To say that having a knowledge of these issues is boring, is honestly, a little ignorant. People from around the world can tell us everything about our nation’s laws and public policy issues, but if you ask someone in America to describe something as simple as the 19th Amendment, most likely they wouldn’t be able to tell you. Like I said before, I’m not asking everyone to know everything about every single issue. That’s not realistic. But what I do ask is to at least have some basic knowledge of what is going on in our government and how it operates.

Posted by Ian Bridgeforth on Apr 23 2010. Filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry