Percentage of eligible Americans who vote: 63
Of Hungarians: 71
Of Uruguayans: 95
I was paging through a Harpers Magazine on my desk to see if I’d already read it, which surprisingly, isn’t an exact science, as in, I just have to look at the words to see if I have already read it. It doesn’t work that way. How many of you have started a book and got dozens of pages into it and then realized that you’d already read the book? That’s what I’m talking about. I often read the letters in one month’s magazine about stories from a month or two back and can’t recall what on god’s green earth they’re lettering about.
It’s memory and attention and focus and all things I struggle with, and you probably struggle with, as we all struggle with the phones, the Internet, apps and the games and the movies, shows and the videos; blockbusters, podcasts and now, god damn it, AI and Chat GPT. That’s kicking a man when he’s down. It’s all too much and it’s evolving so fast. None of this was here when many of us were growing up and even adults. And it’s a firehose. No wonder we’re all barking at each other and fighting amongst ourselves about pointless issues – while the robber barons rob us bare, of course. Our phones and tablets scream at us, so we scream at one another. It’s about that simple.
And all of that distracts us from important things like voting.
Luke Soiseth 