Are we smart enough...

to elect effective representatives, or politicians as they are more commonly known ?

A conversation I engaged in earlier this week set my mind wondering if, in fact, common everyday people have the mental where-with-all to evaluate and vote for people with altruistic motives who will actually endeavor to do the best thing for the country and it's populace.

Today I don't even want to talk about the lobbyists who purchase laws favorable to their clients.

No, I want to look at some personal choices ordinary people make in their lives and ponder whether they can be trusted to make better choices when electing Representatives to U.S. government offices.

The fact that smoking causes lung cancer became public in  the 1920's by scientists in Germany.  Here in the U.S.,  in 1964 (the year I started smoking cigarettes,) the Surgeon General declared a link between cancer and smoking. It took twenty years before an aggressive effort began to discourage smoking in this country and even longer in some European countries..  Yet today people of voting age continue to smoke and  I doubt if any of them can say they are not aware of the facts that smoking has a deleterious impact on the users health.  Why should I believe that the personal choice to ruin ones health for momentary satisfaction can give rise to good choices in picking politicians?

How about the choice to over-eat to the point of Morbid obesity, and it is a choice.  Of that I have no doubt.

Or the fellow, or gal for that matter, who chooses to spend the weekly rent money or family grocery money in the local tavern or opium den.  What do you think of their history of making good choices.

The driver who chooses to drive drunk,  the rapist, the pedophile, the robber, murderer etc. etc.

In the conversation I alluded to earlier, the person with whom I was engaged, adamantly, wanted to paint all law enforcement people with a wide brush of negativity because a relative of theirs had been treated in a way that they felt inappropriate.  This example of what I call haywire thinking gives me pause to agree with pogo: We have met the enemy and he is us.