Saturday, October 27, 2007

The Election Standard

As a teacher you constantly ask your students to live up to a certain standard. Sometimes it is rather funny how that same standard is not practiced in the real world. I thought of this often this week as our Student Council held their elections.

Since I am the Student Council sponsor, it was up to me to coordinate the election and lay down the ground rules. I have a coworker that I grew up with whom helps me with student council- Miss. Godby- and also came up with some rules for the election. We used real life as our ‘don’t do this’ list.

Our candidates could not engage in any name calling, backbiting, poor sportsmanship, bribery, or ‘dirty’ campaigning. It was all very humorous to me because all of these qualities that were unacceptable in our school election are the norm in American politics. It is amazing how ‘un’ issues oriented our political spectrum really is. It seems like this is the standard more in this coming election than ever before.

At our ‘debate’, which was little more than a candidate giving a speech, students were only allowed to talk about themselves: what they would like to see happen and what they would like to do. All candidates who were running, because they were on stage with everyone else, were required to show good sportsmanship by clapping for each candidate, even if they were the opponent.

It really was amazing how un-real the whole process was.

The saddest part about all of this is that Americans seem to be getting more and more complacent as time goes on. When you look at the field of candidates running in the coming election you get really disheartened. Never in my political life have I been as clueless as to who I will vote for. I am one of those neo, ultraconservative, religious, right-winged republicans and I think all of the candidates who are running this time are an absolute joke. It is sad that in a country of 300 MILLION we cannot find anyone better suited to run our country than the few we have to choose from.

America is at a dangerous time. It is a time where, after generations of liberalism, she has lost her purpose-her vision. America doesn’t really know who she is anymore and too many are unwilling to stand up and remind her.

Our election went off without a hitch. As soon as the results were tallied, all the candidates met in the library to hear the news first. They patted each other on the back and clapped for the winners. It was anything but realistic. America could have learned a lot from our Student Council election.

3 comments:

Michelle said...

I have to agree that whoever gets the Republican nomination is not going to be what America needs, but I have decided that a moderate is better than Hillary! I'm thinking mainly of Supreme Court nominations, those cannot be undone 4 years later!

Unknown said...

Sad and true. We are basically an Oligarchy, headed for Anarchy, which will make us prime for a Dictator or Tyrant and are a country that is detrimentally asleep. Talk about a nation in absolute confusion....

Gene Holley said...

I have no idea who any of the Addams family are!