The Schrug

A friend-of-a-Facebook-friend said today that he’d voted for “real change” in the form of Scott Brown, the Republican senatorial candidate in Massachusetts. I asked, “real change from what to what?” He hasn’t yet responded.

A vote for Scott Brown is not a vote for real change. It’s a vote for no change. And somehow that seems to be what people want these days, even as they curse their present conditions.

It’s not just the Republicans anymore. Independents and even many Democrats seem to have decided that just about everything done or proposed by government is a bad idea. That includes all the ideas that were considered good ideas when recently proposed by candidates as opposed to actual officeholders. How else can we explain the huge shift in public opinion over the last few years? After giving the GOP “a thumping” in 2006 and 2008, we’re now turning against the people we brought in to replace them. A year after 60% of Massachusetts voters supported Obama, it now seems that a majority are going to vote to stop him from doing what he said he was going to do.

What is going on? What are people thinking? Are they thinking?

I can imagine a few reasons why a voter would just say no:

• Things are fine the way they are and are going to get better. [This view has been in the minority for years.]
• Things could be better, but anything the government tries to do about it will make it worse.
• Things could be better for other people, but that’s not my problem.
• Things could be better for me and/or other people if government did something, but I’m not willing to make other changes in my life necessary for the government’s plan to work.

I think the second position can be proven false by examining history, and it makes me sad to think that we as a society seem to have forgotten that government can be a good thing.

It also makes me sad that there are a lot of people holding the third position, but at least it’s a position that’s intellectually defensible if not politically correct. Fortunately, I think the number of people who truly feel this way is not large.

It’s the folks in the last group that are in some ways the scariest, particularly because I don’t think they fully comprehend what they’re saying or thinking. We’ve become a society that wants to lose weight without diet or exercise, get wealthier without adding value to anything, and get more of everything while spending less – especially from government.

I was a psychology major. I understand that resistance to change is part of the human psyche. But change is going to come whether you like it or not. The question is whether you want to make it happen or let it happen. Which camp are you in?