79 degrees this morning, walk 34:55 minutes humidity 67% 3,192 steps
Air seemed heavy this morning, perhaps it is as much a result of how I feel as it is the reality of the morning. Hard time starting this morning and it just seemed to go slow. Not that I didn’t enjoy it, it just seemed a lot more heavier this morning.
Stars were out and the the slightly more than half moon is tilted towards the east even. so i’m not sure when the moon actually sets.
Pace this morning was 19 seconds more than my goal or exactly one minute per mile more than I walked yesterday. Obviously something was different!
I felt more tired than normal this morning, which may be one reason for it.
A friend and I were discussing the horrible elected officials in a city I used to live in, and we were wondering how such obvious incompetents got elected. Ditto with a lot of elected offices.
I said what I thought at the time was an original (or somewhat original) quote “Apathy is the worst vice”. I research i a little and realize it is a common saying!
Obviously apathy allows incompetents, crooks, cowards and petty tyrants to get into office and frequently stay in office.
While I may criticize apathy, now that I am on the other side, I can understand what appears to be apathy may also just be a reaction to the barriers to participation by the persons in office (both elected and appointed) who like apathy since it allows them to get away with a lot, such as secret meetings, awarding contracts to donors and friends etc.as well as ignoring the public.
It also allows them to proceed without receiving the honest opinion of residents. Even the best of the elected and appointed officials occasionally become discouraged by the lack of participation of residents.
Again, I think we need to look at our structure of participation, of how we encourage (or discourage) participation. Meeting times, even the lack of other means of participation are all barriers to participation.
When I was in graduate school I wrote a research paper on “participatory democracy” which forced me to read many of the anti-establishment writers of the period and it really opened my eyes about democracy.
Of course, now, with literally billions of “dark money” dollars being spent by cowards who won’t identify themselves in lies and deceitful advertising by people who have so much money it is meaningless, big corporations and organizations wield a lot more influence than the voter does.
There have been cases where big corporations sponsor “voter propositions” and then spend millions trying to influence the vote so they can steal billions of tax dollars.
That is what scares me more than apathy.
That’s it for now, Saturday, September 1, 2018.
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