A Frustration

There's something that I've been reading a bit about that bugs me to death. Now, I'm not as political as I was when I was in college. At the time, I ate, breathed and slept politics, and I was rather liberal. My beliefs haven't exactly changed, but I do not expend the same amount of energy on it all as I used to. Maybe I've learned enough not to act as if I know so much, or I don't care to treat it like a game you score points in.

Anyway, there are things that maybe I would have been into that I am not now. There's this thing that apparently happens now. The idea is that you start a petition over something that you send off to the White House if you get enough names. If you get enough names, they have to respond to your petition. That's some kind of law, or agreement. That's all there is to it. I don't see that anything actually has to happen except that a reply is formulated and sent.

I have to say that I don't see the point in it even when there is something really serious in the petition. Is it so rewarding to get some kind of non-answer or an answer that has no backing to it? I don't imagine so. It gets even worse when the petition is over something absolutely absurd. I have recently read of a petition to build a Death Star. That just drives me up the wall that somebody would go and make the effort to get enough signatures, forcing someone who could be doing something more useful for the country to reply.

I guess I could see it as pointing out the very absurdity and pointlessness of the thing, and maybe that's what the idea was. Maybe the point is to get attention, and I'm sorry to say that I've gone and swallowed that hook, line and sinker. If that's not the thing, it makes me mad anyway, but I would just as soon that whoever has the power to do away with this whole thing sees that this is what the public does with this petitioning endeavor and gets rid of it.