A quote for the day:
What's POPULAR isn't always RIGHT.
What's RIGHT isn't always POPULAR.
In middle school, elections for class officers were always based on popularity. If a member of the so-called popular crowd was running for the office you wanted, you may as well not run, because there is a very low probability that people will even listen to your speech, let alone vote for you. This is not to say that no one cared if the best person was in the job or not, it's just that the people who did care were in the minority. Also, everyone thought the popular person would do the best job. Or they might have thought that, if they voted for the popular person, it would elevate their own popularity status. I don't know for sure. I don't think anyone really does.
I'm not sure you could really judge if they did what was right or what was popular in middle school class politics. I mean, no one ever really came up with ideas that were completely and totally wrong. [Actually, no one ever came forward with ideas and so nothing ever really seemed to get done.] But if you take the same idea and apply it to national politics, that the most popular people get elected, you wonder if our foreign policies, if our economic policies, if our health and education policies are made on a basis of what's right or what's popular. Was it right to go to war in Iraq? Maybe some people thought so...or maybe it was just a popularity scheme...which seems to have backfired, in my opinion... Was the No Child Left Behind policy a publicity gimmick, or was it because Mr. Bush firmly believes it is right to push teachers to make students learn at a certain level?
How can you tell? Difficult to say. Maybe you can tell by the amount of commitment that the policy gets. Maybe you can "just tell", for whatever reason you believe that. But anyway, the point of all rambling was to remind you that
What's POPULAR isn't always RIGHT.
What's RIGHT isn't always POPULAR.
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