ELECTIONS (2012) 

It's election time! On the 12^th of septemer the Dutch can vote for a new president, later on in the year Barack Obama and Mitt Romney reach for one of the most important positions on the globe; being president of the United States of America.

In both cases politics gets into the open. Candidates have to go public and perform on debatingprograms on television.

In the Netherlands and in America, we see the same tendency. Politicians are completely alienated from day to day reality. The way they analyze reality and are making plans for the future is shocking. None of them is talking about the ecological disasters that are hitting us, the exploitation of natural resources and the endless spilling as if there is no tomorrow.

The seas are emptied and the catches get less and less. Fish, common food for billions, well turn into a precious commodity, to be eaten by the rich and wealthy. For a decadent luxury, like caviar or shark fin soup, millions of sturgeons and sharks loose their lives, while we consume only a tiny bit of it. They don't talk about a disastrous economy, based on unhealthy overconsumption. Jobs are no jobs anymore. Most of the population will earn their living by having 2 or 3 jobs, which brings no satisfaction or future at all. They don't talk about growing trailerparks and big city-slums, They don't talk about the loneliness and empty world of many of the elderly.They don't talk about the degradation of education into distraction. They don't talk about all the free time we provide for the young, which they have completely for themselves. They don't talk about the violence in role-playing games. This is not a game, this is programming the youth's mindframe that violence is acceptable and something you can excell in. You never die if you keep pulling the trigger. They don't talk about the destruction of the landscape and the city, turning them into a boring, empty place, where the wind always is blowing. To get some oil out of a certain type of sand, the soil (and everything on it) is stripped and removed; leaving us and our descendants with a huge dessert,

When Barack Obama or Mitt Romney sketch a beautiful future, I think about the more than 2 million American prisoners. They are the product of the American (Western) way of living, but they don't fit in anymore. Not in the present and certainly not in the American Dream, both presidential candidates prophesy (when you make the right choice).