Are Elected Officials Civil Servants?

This weekend I saw the film "Lincoln." What a brilliant movie. When we got home as I built the fire, I got to thinking that the Lincoln that was portrayed in the film was such an incredible "civil servant." This led me to think about the political figures we elect today. Are they the civil servants we elect them to be?

And, even if our elected officials are not voting in their constituents' best interests all the time, do their constituents know and/or care? I am a rather politically-minded person, and to be completely honest, I had to look up the representative I was voting for last month the day before Election Day. I moved here in July and I knew nothing about local politics or who our representative was. But what about the rest of the population who isn't as politically-minded? Do they just vote straight-ticket?

The thing is, back in Lincoln's day, there wasn't all the extra crap we have in our lives now. It used to be that if you lived in town, you would get a weekly paper if you could afford it. If you lived on a farm, you might get the news once a month, if you were lucky, and it was the only news you had for the next month! It really gave you time to understand the news and care about it before you moved on to the next thing.

Now, if we're listening to the news as we're starting our day or reading one of the hundreds of daily newspapers we have access to, we can hear one minute about something our congressman has said in passing, then the next minute hear something terrible about how a building has been blown up halfway across the world, and then hear about how some pop icon has gotten her hair dyed and "Oh my god, what a fashion faux pas." And then we go about our day, getting inundated with more stimuli with everything we do, so that by the end of the day we don't even remember what our congressman said.

Even though it's harder for us to keep up with our congressmen and congresswomen because we have so much going on in our lives, it's important that we do pay attention to what they're doing. We live in a democracy and part of our job is to vote for the people we think will do the best job in our best interests. Our job goes deeper, though, than just voting. We need to be informed voters, and not just informed the day before Election Day!

"Be the change you wish to see in the world." --Gandhi