Risk; and electing challengers

Seth Godin wrote about risk and apparent risk today on his blog.

And while the Dayton Daily News seems to think (“Incumbents Joey Williams and Nan Whaley …are the best bets for Dayton voters.”) that adding one or two heretics to the Dayton City Commission would be a really bad decision- the reality is, it still takes 3 votes to pass anything. If Matt Joseph, Dean Lovelace and the remainder of the “W” faction (Whaley or Williams) decide to vote against challengers Gary Leitzell and me (if we are both elected) there will be no change at all.

Seth writes:

There are people who I will never encounter in a restaurant.

That’s because when these people go out for dinner, they go to chain restaurants. These are the tourists in New York who seek out the familiar Olive Garden instead of walking down the street to Pure.

That’s fine. It’s a personal choice.

But it got me thinking about the difference between apparent and actual risk, and how that choice affects just about everything we do…

Apparent risk is what gets someone who is afraid of plane crashes to drive, even though driving is more dangerous….

When things get interesting is when the apparently risky is demonstrably safer than the actually risky. That’s when we sometimes become uncomfortable enough with our reliance on the apparent to focus on the actual.

via Seth’s Blog: Apparent risk and actual risk.

It reminds me of a joke my Grandmother liked (one of her cleaner ones)-

Everyday John would sit down and open his lunch box and complain to his co-workers: “Meatloaf, everyday, meatloaf” and proceed to eat his meatloaf.

After months of this, Frank asked him, “John, if you hate meatloaf so much, why don’t you ask your wife to pack you something different.”

John looks up- and says, “What wife? I pack it myself.”

If we keep electing people who talk about streamlining government, but haven’t done it. If we keep electing who the party tells us to on slate cards, we’ll be the Johns of this world. And judging by some of the alleys in Westwood I saw yesterday- we’re pretty close to that right now.

Are you ok with the same old  meatloaf from the Olive Garden?

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