David Slack and ‘for any damn reason’ to vote
Posted: September 5, 2017 Filed under: Letters | Tags: climate change, climate disruption, David Slack, desperation, electoral politics, fear, nuclear weapons Leave a commentThe Editor, The Sunday Star Times, Auckland
31 August, 2017
Dear Editor:
David Slack (27 Aug) says that “ . . . you can vote for whatever reason you like. . . It doesn’t have to make any sense at all”. Analysts and speech writers like Slack have thought that a good rational argument was their best friend, but now know that that was “Wrong.”
Now I expect Slack was never so clueless as he claims, but he is on to something here, even if he refuses to go deep enough to understand the current NZ political landscape. He gets a bit closer later: “They’re entitled to vote any damn way they want, for any damn reason.” But that’s not specific enough.
What Slack and most all other commentators do is put this down to individual emotional perspectives and fail to see what is deeply common. Now that climate change and nuclear weapons have fundamentally altered what is survivable, a deep fear of the scope of the required changes to cope has led to this ‘post truth era’ we are living in. Mr. Slack and others need to factor that into their analysis.
Richard Keller
