Well son-of-a-bitch. Do you know what our government is up to now? Actually, I believe they’ve been up to it for awhile, but I’m just now learning about it. A “fat tax” is what they’re calling it. It’s actually a one penny tax on foods considered to be low in nutrition and high in calories and/or fat. Some senator is also proposing the tax to be on video games as well. The full story is on MSN if you want to check it out. Now, a one penny tax on soft drinks can bring in a lot of money and it doesn’t change the price that much so my first impulse wasn’t to be overly dismayed. But then I started thinking about it. Why does the government get to decide what’s good for us and bad for us? Why do they get to tax certain items to “encourage” us not to buy them? I understand the need for taxes, I am democratic afterall, they are a necessary part of the world. But where do you draw the line? At what point do you say, “hey, I get to decide what I want to spend my money on and you don’t get to charge me more because you don’t approve!”

I find this all very irritating. My life, my fate lies in the hands of men I don’t know anything about, not really. The government is incredibly complicated and I have not made nearly enough of a study of it. Now, obviously it has to be complicated and there are significant variables to be dealt with in legislation, but doesn’t it strike anyone as a little odd that the average American knows so little about it? We choose to know so little about it. We get confused and give up. We ignore high school civics classes and sleep our way through political science 101 (if we even take it). Meanwhile, other people make a lot of money off our ignorance.

This is not something I am happy about and I do hope to take a more active part in my government in the future. But I implore you, anyone who is reading this, to take an active part yourselves. We need to converse amongst ourselves. Help each other find ways of being heard. Give each other ideas. And we must hurry. Soon the government will be taxing ideas as well as going to war over them.