#934 – Dick Bernard: Eight weeks (56 days) to November 4, Election Day 2014.

Yesterdays post, here, relates to this one.

Recently, in an e-mail, came a very interesting short test on current events* from the highly respected Pew Research Center. It asks 13 questions: “What do you know about the news?”.
You can take the test privately. Here it is. Elsewhere in this post I will tell you how I did, compared with the national sample who were surveyed August 7-14, 2014.
Re the next eight weeks, there is really nothing to add to what will incessantly be irritatingly obvious: there is a major election in a few weeks.
As usual, in a non-presidential year, most people won’t vote at all (it’s mid-term, after all); a distressing percentage of those who’ll vote really don’t know the issues, much less where the candidates stand on the issues, much less even knowing who the candidates are.
The bottom line for me remains: We like to complain about “government”; but we’re actually complaining about ourselves.
If we were a dictatorship, or if there wasn’t a reasonably solid statutory base for “one person, one vote”, we might have more of a right to complain. But the vast majority of us CAN vote.
We each have as much power, through an informed vote, as the richest person in the country: one vote. True, big money can influence votes through these incessant and vacuous media ads and mailers we will see, without end. But ads don’t vote, either, except through us.
A good place to start, today, is to find out who your candidates will be on November 4. For Minnesotans (my state), here’s the entry point. All you need to know is your where you live. All the other rules are to be found at the same website. Other states doubtless have similar resources.
Once you know your candidates, find out what they stand for, really (not just the ads), and let the people who you know, know where you stand, and why.
And if you’re not sure about someone who’s a candidate ask someone you trust about them.
In the end, I hope we elect more folks who truly care about the entire country, than simply about their own particular ideology. We used to have a tradition, Republican and Democrat, which was more like that, than it is today.
Again, if we want change, we’ll be the ones to demand it through our vote on November 4, and in future elections.
* – Did you take the test referred to at the beginning?
The person who passed the test along to me said this: “Try this test! It is very interesting. It will test your knowledge of current events. It is interesting that 11 people of the original survey conducted by Pew Research did not get a single question correct.
This is an excellent test and it shows results in a number of ways. National results indicate that the majority of Americans don’t know what is going on in their country. Are these the “low information voters” we have been hearing about?
It is astonishing that so many people got less than half of the questions right. The results say that 80% of the voting public are basically clueless about current events. That’s pretty scary but not at all surprising.
There are no trick questions in this test — Either you know the answer or you don’t. It will give you an idea whether or not you are current on your information data base.”
My score? I got 12 of 13.