Five minutes to vote
The late American writer Elbert Hubbard said: “Every man is a damn fool for at least five minutes every day; wisdom consists in not exceeding the limit”.
By the way, casting a vote in a ballot process takes no more than five minutes and it seems that some voters get exposed to Hubbard’s five-minute curse while doing so, which makes the outcome of the democratic process subject to sectarianism, tribalism and categorization. I mean that the responsibility of selecting members of the legislative power mainly depends on voters and no matter how long we talk about interference of influential people, economic powers and sheikhs in the election process, voters, and nobody else, are actually the key factors in it.
Interferences may have a 2-4 percent impact, however, but the final decisive decision is in the hands of voters and the government has nothing to do with it. Moreover, ‘political funds’ have nothing to do with it, even it poured like waterfalls in each electoral constituency. The main responsibility lies on voters themselves. So, if a voter elects his cousin for the sake of blood kinship and refrains from electing a PhD holder for the same reason, what does the government have to do with that? Similarly, what do influential people have to do with it? The real problem lies in the base of the pyramid, not the top!
Kuwaiti voters do not yet possess enough political awareness that would help them make independent decisions regardless of tribal, sectarian, racial or regional affiliations. The real disaster is that these people include highly educated people, media members and specialized academics!
Therefore, the problem lies in voters’ mentality, who are the very same people tweeting posts criticizing the current parliament that they had elected using very contradicting double standards because they had elected their own cousins or fellow tribesmen, and once the parliament was in office, they started whipping it. I am not talking the current parliament alone. The same had applied for all previous ones. If the parliament is as bad as they claim, who elected its members in the first place?!
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