Captain’s Log: Common Language

I watch too much news. Read, watch, ingest. My current‑events intake is way too high.

And I’m beginning to notice some patterns — unsettling observations about how we communicate and how we make a shared life together in our communities and in our country.

Something is happening here. That old song just came to mind, and I’m transported back to the good old music of the 1970s, where they sang about a revolution. We are not alright.

For what it’s worth… I don’t think things went the way our parents thought they would when they didn’t like the society they were inheriting. And I don’t think we like the one we’re inheriting.

But what I’m seeing is we’ve come so far away from a common way of looking at the world that it’s difficult to even communicate anymore. We don’t even know our common history — the reason the structure exists the way it does and how to preserve it.

Things have gotten so bad that there is an active, strong bent to not preserve it. To scrap the whole experiment and start over.

I’m worried about that as we approach our 250th anniversary.

Battle lines are being drawn, to continue with our musical theme. People are angry and they want change, but they don’t know enough to realize they’re mad about the wrong things — and the change they want is for a system they know nothing about.

Take, for instance, just one small example in the primary election coming up in June.

The number of complaints and wailing is shocking. People are mad that they can’t vote in the primary election. They say they are disenfranchised and it isn’t fair.

They don’t know that state law governs elections and our two‑party system, and that the primary election in Nevada is specifically for the parties to choose who they want to send to the general election to represent the party. You can only choose who the Republicans run in the general election if you are a Republican. You can only choose who the Democrats run if the Democrats have candidates running and you are a Democrat. Part of the problem is there are very few Democrats running in local or state races.

That’s a different failure — but not one of the system. That is a failure of the party to recruit candidates. Democrats can’t vote for their candidate if there are no candidates.

I’m working on a much clearer explanation of this phenomenon for our Election Guide, which is scheduled to come out next week, and it is simply one example of how we’re in trouble.

When people are critical of the structure but don’t understand how it works in the first place, that’s a tough place to be.

So while we keep educating ourselves and making sure we understand the structure, we’ll always be right here…

… Keeping you Posted.

Rach