With this entry I go off topic a little to try to flag some important trends. Saturday's Globe and Mail noted that only 21 percent of Canadians under 30 bother to vote in elections. Why might that be? Well, it could be because there's no point. Representative democracy simply doesn't respond to the needs of the electorate. Rather, politicians tell us what we need. "When Tony Blair recently appeared before a studio audience of women who did not want war with Iraq, he sat there telling them why it was necessary." So what would work better? Big Brother - the show, not the overlord. " can't have been the only viewer who was waiting for him to invite us to press the red button on our digital handsets to let him know the result. Big Brother has given us a taste for direct democracy. The cat is out of the bag." Now I wouldn't say that a television show is the answer to our society's problems. But what I am saying is that this sort of phenomenon shows that people not only want, they expect, direct influence over the things that affect their lives. Politicians ignore this at their peril, not because they won't be re-elected (the same old crowd will keep voting them in) but because they will become increasingly irrelevant.
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