Archive for January 7th, 2008
Is there a cure for civic apathy?
Today is the deadline to register to vote to be eligible for Tennessee’s February 5 presidential primary elections. Will the recent theft of registered voter information from the Davidson County Election Commission have any impact? Honestly, it probably won’t have a huge effect, but in an age of voter apathy, it sure won’t help. The Ad Council is hoping to inspire additional civic involvement nationwide through it’s new getgoodkarma.org Web site. I’m more of the “virtue is its own reward” school of thought, but I’m all for anything that encourages more of us to participate in community life. Please take time to register and to vote.
Transparency has a price
As technology evolves and presents us with more and more ways to connect than ever before, all of us — including politicians and civic leaders — are learning to adjust. With each new innovation, it seems that transparency and openness become even more important and more expected from anyone in the public eye.
That transparency, I think, has a price, and while it’s not cheap, it’s well worth the cost. We as a society are going to have to acknowledge that our leaders aren’t much different from the rest of us. We all make mistakes and say (and write) stupid things, and it isn’t always going to be easy to sweep those blunders under the rug.
Embracing the Web is a way for leaders to communicate directly with constituents and have more control over their public image, but it also makes it easier for their words to be used against them, observers say.
“The potential downside is that once you put something on a blog, it’s out there for anybody, and maybe for all time,” said Mark Byrnes, a political science professor at Middle Tennessee State University. “Unfortunately, we’ve gotten to the place where if you’re a public person, anything you’ve ever said or done can be used against you.”
Is this really a bad thing? Shouldn’t you be accountable for your words and your actions, regardless of how much time has passed? As technology and media advancements lift public figures to a higher standard, the price of that standard may be a dose of reality: We’re all human. We all make mistakes, and we all say things we regret. We all hold ignorant opinions and do dumb things, and hopefully along the way we learn from them.
I hope one casualty of this increasing transparency will be the common refusal by public figures to take responsibility for their mistakes. If we’re poised to witness more blunders and missteps than ever before, I hope those errors are followed with healthy doses of “mea culpa.”
