In a democracy, the government is you, so perhaps you are saying quite a bit here about our country. I heard Tuesday night that voter turnout was actually pretty high. The reason France and the U.S. have different perspectives is that France was never a colony with an indigenous population to kill off and a distinct slave population that really got the right to vote barely 50 years ago not to mention religious diversity to make your head spin. Some will vote both for funds to keep ebola from evolving AND to cut funds for schools that teach evolution. Go figure that one.
Puppets, unite and cut your strings!
Someone wrote:
Divide and conquer. The older I get, the more I am certain that this is the
goal of our government. I feel like a puppet and I resent it to no end.
responding to someone else who wrote:
> In thinking a bit more about this, I paid attention not only to what is
> not much reported in the US compared to France but what is more reported in
> the US with respect to turnout.
>
> On NPR in the car this morning, there were reports on the percentage of
> black voters, or Hispanic voters, of white voters, of male and female
> voters, young and old voters, also the percentage of each group that voted
> for which of the only two parties anyone ever reports about in the US. I
> half expected an analysis of female Italian-American gay voters with six
> toes 😉 All is in terms of percentage of actual voters, not of the
> population (and nothing about total turnout). In France, there is reporting
> of male vs female turnout, but the population is generally not described in
> such a fragmented manner. Perhaps this ties in with a French myth of a
> civil society in which all are supposed to be equal (in much the same way
> that the US used to have a melting pot myth).
>
> I imagine that similar sorts of information could be found in France, but
> it is not generally placed front and center the way it is in the US.