Those of you who understand Finnish and read Turun Sanomat (TS) know that it’s easy to find things to get annoyed about in that paper. For me getting annoyed has almost become the automatic response when reading their editorials, and nowadays I’ve noticed that I can get stuck on single sentences or paragraphs even when there’s nothing wrong with the topic they write about or how they adress it. I think I am less critical when reading other newspapers, it’s only the editorials of TS and perhaps Kyrkpressen that I read thoroughly enough to start attempting to think about what they are trying to say with every single sentence.
This time it was saturday’s editorial on the Barack Obama -campaign that caught my eye. The context was that Obama had held his acceptance speech in Denver the day before. In his speech he highlighted that John McCain has voted for the law proposals made by George W Bush 9 times out of 10 during the past years and that this implies that McCain wouldn’t bring with him the change the Americans want. TS went on listing some of the issues the americans have struggled with during the Bush-reign, i.e. 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the housing market crisis as well as the rising fuelprices. So far so good, but then we get to the part where I disagree on how TS had written the editorial. Refering to the issues above, TS claimed that the speech was clearly aimed at the middle class, because the middle class has suffered the most from these issues. The most? It might be what in swedish is called hair-splitting, but I get frustrated by the word ”most” in that sentence. Because I belive it’s not those in the middle who suffer the most when things are going bad, it’s those at the bottom. Most of the American casualties in Iraq&Afghanistan have come from poor conditions (as those who enlist in the army tend to be from poor conditions), and the impacts of a stagnating economy are worst for those who were already stuggling before. Obama’s speech might’ve been aimed at the middle class, I don’t disagree with that, but that was probably not because they would’ve been the ones suffering the most, but because their votes are what you win elections with.
From this I come to one of the most difficult issues in politics for me at the moment. TS listed that the rising fuel prices have been held as one of the biggest problems in the USA recently. I, on the other hand, think that the fuel prices actually are too low in the USA. As a principle, I think fuel prices should be higher everywhere. The problem is the same problem I argued about before, that is that the impact of even higher fuel prices is biggest at the bottom. This leads to the very complicated equation of having to weight ecological considerations against how implementing for example higher environmental taxes affects food price and the lives of those who are poor. And then, to draw this one more step further, one has to think about those who will be poor in the future as well. If we don’t care about how big our ecological footstep is today and use far too much resources, then inequality will be even bigger in the future, and there will be even greater problems with poverty than there is now.
Anyway, what I am running for is the Turku council, and the issues I would have to deal with there are somewhat on a smaller scale than what I got rambling about in that last paragraph. Often the issues are also quite straightforward if you worry about the environment, I think it is quite obvious that both rich and poor both today and in the future gain from us developing the public transport system instead of building yet another parking centre in Turku. But the point I was trying to make is that as a decisionmaker you have to be aware of the fact that your decisions can have a different impact at different levels. Sometimes I get the feeling not everyone remembers this.
