Real Life

As anyone who watches Stephen Colbert knows, there's Chaos in Chaonada because of the election.

It's interesting to follow election coverage on Twitter. You really do get a sense of the campaign world. Journalists are sequestered with candidates to travel all over the country; they have to find and file stories from veeerry scripted photo ops and canned announcements.

It's interesting, but in many ways, it's not real life. Not even for the journalists. Which is probably why it's interesting. (To watch, that is.)

Meanwhile, other political stuff is happening. The provincial fiscal year is starting soon, and a new budget was announced. Income tax season is here -- filing date is May 2, which happens also to be the date of the election. One might wonder whether the attention to personal income during the election will change how voters view the issues and thus influence how they vote.

But that assumes that regular people consider themselves to be voters. In the 2008 election, fewer than 60% of eligible voters did.

It's easy to think that political news is boring, that the rarefied air around candidates during an election separates "them," those politicians and journalists, from "us," the real people.

And sometimes, the scope of your world changes. It really does. Everything that's important to you is happening in just one hospital room, or just one uterus, or just one manufacturing plant (the one that happens to employ you), or just one University or Grade 5 classroom.

The thing is, what happens in those smaller spaces is still affected by what's said on those buses and planes, what's caught on camera and put online. All that political stuff is translated to policy, or isn't, and is included in the budget, or isn't, and then it affects "real life."

Access to pre-natal care, the cost of power to run a plant, the number of health professionals working in that one hospital room, the qualifications of person teaching in that classroom -- all are determined by stuff happening in politics.

Really: vote. It is "real life."