Election Day

California is a strange state. We elect a state legislature and then make all the governmental decisions via proposition. This year there are Props at the State level, most of them proposed by Our Governor. Then there are the city props. There are also county props. This year we only had to elect three actual humans; the rest was propositions of various sorts. And the advertising for a lot of these proposals makes considerable noise about the Evil of Legislators ("Hey, if the legislators are for it, I'm against it!"). But we don't seem to let the legislators do any legislating (all the big things are decided by You, the Voter, who can be swayed by advertising and don't have the time or resources to research the issues, and can be relied upon to vote emotion or pocketbook). This is a strange state.

I blame civics classes. I don't know what they're teaching kids these days, but I do know I grew up believing that government was a high calling. And I still believe that, somewhere deep in my cynical, irritable, panicky soul. Government may screw up, and because of the money and power involved, sometimes the wrong people are called to it. But I blame those people (I've got, as you might imagine, a long list of people I am happy to blame) and not governance. I don't want outsiders running my government; the learning curve is steep and time gets wasted. I want people who think that government is a high calling, and want to be part of that. You know, the kids who grew up thinking that anyone can grow up to be President, and doesn't regard that as an entitlement program or a curse.