Big And Little Questions
Big Question:
Were Christians winners or losers in the election or somewhere in between? Here’s how we voted.
Little Question:
What if less than half a million people showed up or voted differently? Romney would have won. My father always said “What if” questions were a waste of time. But then again, Dad never read comics.
Huge Question:
DO YOU REMEMBER when school cafeterias and restaurants around the nation served fish on Friday because our Catholic friends did not eat meat? Apparently that change in practice created a void:
The Los Angeles City Council has declared every Monday to be a so-called ‘meatless Monday,’ and is urging all residents to participate in the weekly day of vegetarianism.
NBC Los Angeles reports that with the vote Los Angeles has become the largest city to embrace the Meatless Monday campaign, a nonprofit with the goal of cutting down on meat consumption for health and environmental reasons.
Neither city officials nor law enforcement will be allowed to force residents to not eat meat, The Los Angeles Daily News reports. Rather, the resolution is meant to encourage residents to not eat meat once a week in the hopes of starting a city-wide trend.
Somehow I think this goes back to the first question this post asked. We HAVE to be engaged in politics and government because if we are not the alternatives will be.
Posted in Analyzing 2012, Reading List | 3 Comments » | 
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JLF9999 on 12 Nov 2012 at 8:50 am #
“…if we are not the alternatives will be…” Just like the election, the other guys wanted it more than we did. It is like a football game – train hard play hard. Train less hard and you lose. That is the ethos of my beloved Boise State Broncos. That is how head coach Chris Peterson has taken players the bigger name schools rejected and turned them into a national powerhouse. Everyone knows the fundamentals of his position – and maybe a couple of others – and executes better and more often than the other team. His record is 81 wins and 8 losses in 7 seasons so it must work. The proof? Our recently graduated quarterback, Kellen Moore, was the winningest quarterback in college football history. Yet he is undersize, he can’t run and he can’t throw. On paper, this team looks an awful lot like the national Republican party. We have fewer loyal members, less money, a poorer ground game and we seem only to be able to recruit candidates with less than stellar appeal. It seems our guys are not cool and to a large portion of the electorate that is critical – like it or not.
If I was to take this analogy a little further I would say that we do not train hard enough. We don’t want it as bad as the other guys. We have too many team members who stayed home, who did not train hard and failed us when the team needed them most. Maybe the conversation should be about the head coach. I don’t mean another Mitt Romney. The candidate is just another player. I mean who should we get to turn the Republican party into a powerhouse? Maybe that person is the party chair or maybe that person is the power behind the throne. I don’t know. But whoever it is, we certainly need him or her and we can’t afford to continue screening out large portions of the population in our search for that person.
GottaZoom on 12 Nov 2012 at 10:17 am #
Using percentages can help make the vote totals meaningful – or meaningless.
How many stories will we see comparing the Bush vs. Romney Mormon vote percentages? Will someone argue this illustrates and supports the O “mandate”?
What’s missing is a review of the vote totals compared to those prior years so that one might get more perspective.
“We HAVE to be engaged in politics and government . . . ”
I agree, though too often arguments are framed as values vs. personal freedoms. Personal freedoms are generally a given – desirable individual and community consequences are needing focus and understanding.
JLF9999 on 12 Nov 2012 at 12:51 pm #
Chris Matthews said the Republican Party is running out of angry old white guys. I used to think that was just Matthews running off at the mouth like he always does. Few take him as a serious commentator anymore except when he hits it in the nose. If you go to Glenn Beck’s The Blaze and read many of the comments, that is precisely what you see – angry, mal-adjusted people making the craziest noises you ever read.
Others see them as us, even though they are not. If you read some of the trash attributed to the Tea Party membership you can see why those who know nothing about the movement think all conservatives are Evangelical, inbred, sister marrying, mouth breathers. It is unfortunate that some are but not all. But that is our problem isn’t it? We have not separated us from them. The distances remain too close. In reality, the Tea Party membership version 1.0, was all about fiscal sanity and attracted Republican, independent and Democrat alike. But as soon the crazies jumped on board we began to read about the virtues of all sorts of lunatic fringe thinking. Ron Paul was just one small piece of that nut pie.