Can you even decide?

As I am not a US citizen (but nevertheless a bona-fide, legal immigrant with a green card), I've carried a certain sense of smugness about being uninvolved with civic participation these last few years. There's a mild sense of amusement in feeling above the fray, beyond the reach of the frenzy that's swept up so many of the other college-brats, making them fawn at the every word of a certain junior senator from Illinois, whose face is plastered in gawdy neon colors on the oversized t-shirts of hip-hop types, while sneering with contempt at the very image of the septugenarian Vietnam vet and his pet Alaska governor.

I quite enjoy the feeling, but I think I'm still going to do the citizenship thing for the travelling priviledges.

But here's a conclusion I've come to for a while now: there is no ideal to be found in democracy, or free choice in and of itself. Going further, there is little sense in egalitarian principles being the fundamenal goal of society.

Actually, the latter is a little easier to explain: unless you subscribe to the anarchist philosophy of no governance, a society based on rational-legal principles necessarily involve control, and any form of control is, in some sense, an inequity. While there is some sense of secular morality in humans, laws nevertheless must be backed by the threat of coercion in order to have meaning. All this social-science whining about classes, races, various viewpoints not being heard...doesn't amount to anything. Real life is simpler than theories. You either play the game and get what you want, or you suck it up and accept your place as is.

Possibly more distasteful is this free-choice thing, of doing what feels right for you. Too much choice only serves to confuse, not liberate. Just think of the electorate: there is so much information available out there, so many perspectives, that it's doubtful that anyone has made their choice today with the full range of considerations. Even if a person went out and did the research, there are still long-term, indirect effects of every decision, every policy, that are immune to prediction. Meanwhile, even a partial look at your home page headlines will turn up a study that says one thing today, and another contrasting it tomorrow. Experiments, surveys, other instruments of social-science study only tell us anything about the population involved therein, no more and no less.

At this point...all we really have is our youth. And what should we do with it but be pleasant to everyone; that is, indifferent to everyone.