Freedom to Listen In - May 4, 2010

Good Tuesday morning! Did you catch the city council candidate forum last night? I listened to it on the radio while a baseball game was playing on the television. Just to make the whole experience even more multi-media, I got out the stopwatch app on my IPad and timed the responses. The timekeeper was a little generous on a couple of occasions; sometimes you just gotta tell them local politicians to hush up! I'll leave the opinions to you and the reporting to the official news organizations, but it was fun to listen for the differences in the responses to our questions. By "our" I mean the community, none of the questions were submitted by me personally.

However, I did have one question that probably wouldn't have made the cut: do you tithe? That seems like a simple yes or no question, perhaps you even think that would be between the person and God. An answer could point out much about a candidate though. Financial responsibility in taxes and budgeting seemed to be a major issue among the questions; what better to tell a candidates personal sense of responsibility than to find out if he or she tithes? These days that question might go unanswered, but it might also cause a little hot foot among the candidates. Just an interesting thought from last night.

Isn't it great to be in a country where the local election process is open? We didn't have to wait for some official communique to find out the official version of last night's official and secret proceedings. No, we could go to the actual event, watch on the local cable access channel (if you have cable television) or listen on the radio, as I did. I suspect the event was also broadcast on the radio station's web site, but I didn't check that. We listened in live as the candidates gave their responses. This doesn't happen everywhere on this earth. We have quite a lot to be thankful for. Of course, we could also choose to ignore the whole event and vote on our personal opinions or sketchy impressions of the candidates. We have a lot of freedom that many in the world do not enjoy. As with any freedom, we can use it wisely or foolishly.

Praise God for our political freedom!

Bucky