Cartoon by Dave Granlund, find more at
(Disclaimer: No harm or disrespect is meant to the Pope, his followers, Catholics, the Vatican, or anyone else. This is JUST a blog)
I’ve already been on the phone to my trusted friend who will
listen to me moan about literally anything but here goes to y’all…or all y’all. Yes, I did that on purpose for all of you
grammar people. That’s Okie and it is
plural.
Pope Pope Pope,
kinda over hearing about it.
The news reporter deep down inside understands the need for the media
giants to spaz out and run wall to wall coverage but the human mother in me
wonders if there isn’t “other” news today.
Gretchen Carlson gets my admiration for being that reporter
talking about the other news today. The
other news was Presidential race stuff, like polls. Polls are really kind of interesting. They change as quickly as we change our
underwear. We all are doing that
regularly, right? Ok, just checking.
Carlson had the expert on about how we interpret the
polls. Trump is on top followed closely
by Clinton in the “likely candidate” poll.
Her resident expert explains the difficulty in just getting an accurate
poll taken today because of cell phones.
Forty percent of American households no longer have a land line
phone. So these folks are just using
their cell phone that makes financial sense in so many ways. But one thing that makes gathering relevant
information difficult is that people are able to screen their calls. That smart phone displays the number so many
choose NOT to answer their phones. You
have to wonder how accurate the poll is since just a handful will actually
answer. You have to wonder WHO is answering these calls.
This just brings me to another thought I had. If it matters to us who is ahead in the polls,
are we really selecting our candidate because he has our values and morals and
best interests at heart? Or perhaps we
just want to be on the winning team. So
it really shouldn’t be important for us to know who is ahead, right? I mean it is interesting and certainly
provides some coffee shop talk in a small town but does it really matter? I guess it might matter to the candidate and
their team because they might use that as a guide to know when to call it
quits. You might as well not spend your
money running a race you can’t win.
But….what if? I mean,
what if candidates just ran the race, stayed true to why they’re there in the
first place, and didn’t give second thought to polls and numbers? What would that look like?
When Hannah started running track events at first she never
looked back and seemed surprised when she came in first. Then as time when on, she slowly became
interested in how MUCH she was winning by and would look over her
shoulder. This always provided a chance
for the number 2 runner to get that much closer to her. “Just run” I told her. “Don’t look back; focus on you and your job
to win it!” You can always revel in how
slow that poor sucker behind you was later as you’re hanging up your blue
ribbon.
Maybe that would make for a better Presidential race. What if Donald Trump got up, drank his fancy
coffee, secured that gargantuan tuft of desperate hair into place and hopped
onto his favorite jet without concern for where he is right now in the
race? Hmmm. And Hitlery Clinton, (no, I
did not misspell that so bug off) rolled over and into her socialist slippers,
poured herself a cup of organic fair trade environmentally safe sustainable tea
and sat quietly checking (and deleting) her e-mail without a care in the world
as to where she’s polling? Would the
media care less? Would we care less?
I would like to live in a world where a few things are still
a surprise. How would that be? Oh, I know there is a lot at stake in the
nation’s highest office and candidates today need to be prepared. Probably true but I’m just thinking out loud
here.
You should’ve known I have trouble finding my inside voice.
~Carry on,
Anne Taylor
