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The disconnect

We run the risk of allowing the system to drift any which way by not throwing our own paddles in the water and helping keep us on course.

There was a short comment I read in regards to the ongoing Occupy Wall Street protests in New York — and their possible spread to Canadian cities like Toronto and Vancouver.

It read, simply, that one person was having trouble reconciling the participation level in these protests, and the lack of participation in the election process. I assume that is in both the U.S. and in Canada.

Voter turnout is low in both countries and that can bee seen in recent provincial and local elections (there are exceptions, sure, but the trend is a downward spiral). And while there appears to be decent turnout to those Wall Street protests — and possibly more when they come to Canada — the same cannot be said for the venue through which people can create change.

Well, a little change in any case. Electing new politicians to replace old ones doesn’t really change a system.

Perhaps that is the disconnect many people are experiencing.

Political wanna-bes show up, say they are for change, and are then gobbled up by a system that doesn’t really want to change. Perhaps this is why voters at many levels no longer have something to vote for — nothing revolutionary is on offer from people beholden to the system.

Now, changing an entire political system isn’t going to happen overnight. Not in Canada, at least, where our biggest problems are things significantly less threatening than how our leaders torture us, keep us in poverty and never let us leave the country. We have things quite a bit better than that here.

Yet we run the risk of allowing the system to drift any which way by not throwing our own paddles in the water and helping keep us on course.