Sharon Vander Meer

I am fed up with politics. The U.S.A. is overdue for election reform and term limits. According to the Center for Public Integrity, a Pulitzer Prizing winning news site, in the 2016 presidential election, more than $1 BILLION was spent campaigning. It was a brutal election. Each year the diatribes against political opponents becomes more bitter, filled with half-truths and outright lies. Campaigning is less about what good can come of electing a particular candidate and more about the ways the opponent is flawed.

Fewer voters go to the polls. Electing a candidate is often based on who a voter doesn’t like rather than who can do the best job. Knowing who can do the best job is difficult to determine. Weeding through the rhetoric to find a kernel of truth takes an enormous amount of work and political savvy. And the money spent is mind boggling. One billion dollars? I can’t fathom that amount of money. Those dollars could have been better spent for education, economic development, health care, or workforce development.

Representation “by the people and for the people” has all but disappeared. Congress is largely made up of lawyers who have little or no contact with their constituency outside election campaigns. Everyday folks can’t afford to run and if they do and are elected, how will they  hold their own in a city where cost of housing is more than they make in a month? My cynical friends say it’s because everyone in Washington is on the take. Please let it not be so! I want to believe there are still elected officials who have integrity, and who have the best interest of the country as their priority. I don’t see a lot of that, but I remain hopeful.

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