Democratic ADD
According to James Jay Carafano in today’s New York Post, the press has moved on from the Deepwater Horizon spill—at least, they don’t care about the disaster nearly as much as the locals in the Gulf do.
Carafano’s main project is to criticize the federal response to the spill, on behalf of Americans in the Gulf. But he also notes that people who aren’t still personally affected by the disaster are forgetting about the situation in the Gulf States, or that most people and our news media have a memory problem.
The idea that the citizenry gets apathetic unfortunately quickly with certain issues, like distant disasters and politicians’ records, is not new. It is, nevertheless, important.
Our society is a democratic one. It is the citizens who determine (however indirectly) what decisions are made and what issues need to be decided. If we can only keep our attention focused on each society-spanning problem until another problem arises, how will we resolve them?
Is this democratic ADD one of the reasons we are not a direct democracy, but a representative democracy or republic instead?
TPP’s own Sam Gill has written on a similar topic in a recent Atlanta Journal-Constitution op-ed. Give it a read.
Image used under a Creative Commons attribution license from Flickr user Deepwater Horizon Response.
Related posts:
- Preventing the next Deepwater Horizon
- Sticky situations
- Who is responsible for cleaning up this mess?
- Democratic diversity
- Gladwell and democratic discourse
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Jurgen Habermas explained that the mass media has taken over as the official sources of information for citizens which is bad because these news providers have no accountability and poor transparency as we all know. Jean-Paul Gagnon (http://eprints.qut.edu.au/view/person/Gagnon,_Jean-Paul.html) also gave talks on media ills but highlighted a big problem in our societies: that there are no long-term directions for development taken from us, the people. Who is directing our collective destiny? big business? some elite?
This is a really important article, we have to think hard about these things!