A lot of important elections have been happening around the world lately, and, as many prepare to vote, it has come to my attention that we spend way too much time looking into things that do not matter at the expense of looking carefully into what does matter.

For example, I was reading about the presidential elections in the United States a couple of months ago, and the first bunch of articles I found had a significant number of paragraphs commenting on such things as the candidates’ outfits, their speaking style, and the way they carried themselves.

Granted, these things tell us a lot about an individual; however, they do not seem as important as the proportion of coverage they were given in the news.  There was little on their policies and approaches to various problems they would have to face should they be elected to the Oval Office, only the usual answers that seem to say a lot without really answering the question.

It makes me wonder…

How did we get here?

One reason I can think of is that we, as a society, have perhaps become so removed and uninvolved from the question of governance that we don’t know how to discuss these issues.  If this is the case, then we can’t fault candidates for not wasting their time and energy explaining their position on various topics and issues more thoroughly; it would be like working on a speech to a little baby for hours at a time when whatever words come out of your mouth will entertain it for hours on end.

Not convinced?  Well, just think about your reality and that of those around you.  Can you have an in-depth conversation about the issues facing your neighborhood, city, region, or country?  Can you describe their reality?  Can you explain why the reality is the way it is?  And can you trace a concrete way out?

If, like most of the people I interviewed for this post, you answered “no”, then neither you nor I can fault either the candidates or the news outlets for reporting the not discussing more in-depth these issues with us.

The way out is, in my opinion, for us to get involved in understanding our local reality and, when issues are identified, contributing to their resolution in a proactive way.  This will yield deeper and deeper understanding on the process of governance which in turn will help us gain an increasing understanding of the issues at hand on an increasingly larger scale.