alt Hacker NewsI do agree that local policies are important, but I'm wary of "Nothing happening in the federal governemnt or the middle east or eastern Europe affects me from a local standpoint."
If there's a theme to US politics these days, it's one party or the other trying to get power so they can ram home the same policies across the nation, and the hell with state or local governments that want otherwise.
Since the advent of social media, there's a huge blurring of the lines between national and local issues. The fact that, say, someone got shot 2,000 miles away should be a tragedy, but have no bearing on my own life. But now one party or the other will use it as a cudgel to push policies in my own state and locality.
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Basically everything the feds do winds up getting implemented state or locally in a backhanded national drinking age sort of way.
When you get into the minutia of policy changes and "yeah we'll just enforce what the feds say and let the official rules be wrong until someone sues" type behavior that comes about as a result it'll have you shopping for bulldozers on FBMP.
The roots of the current situation in US politics, arose from concerted actions taken at local levels.
If something happens in the US or the middle east I'll find out about it - because so many other people need to know the same it isn't hard to find enough people to pay for it.
However if something happens in my city - odds are nobody else reading this lives in the same city and so you don't care. There are only about 30,000 people in the world who care about my cities' parks, the rest of you will never care (maybe one of the thousands of you will happen to stop at a park for one hour of your life - but if we have terrible parks you will just head to the next town). However I live here, the parks in my city matter to me, and so I need someone to tell me about them. Remember I just used parks as an example, the school board and library board happen to meet on the same night so it isn't even possible for me to attend both and that is before we account for my kid's having gymnastics at the same night making getting to one tricky.