Change?
Apparently, change is good. One of the main points constantly made in the Obama campaign has been that he stood for “Change”. In this case, it is apparently a change in the political system, although I have my doubts that any politician that started in Chicago is really that different from other politicians. I also find myself skeptical that electing one person can somehow catalyze a governing system that’s worked for over 200 years to suddenly become something new. Or his change is more subtle, and won’t be as obvious to normal, everyday people. In either case, change is good.
Apparently, change is bad. The main complaint I hear leveled against Microsoft products whenever a new one comes out is “It’s different!” Office 2007, for instance, did away with the horrid convoluted drop-down menus that had cluttered up previous versions of Office (to the point where ninety percent of requested features already existed in the program). The first response? “It’s different! They changed it!” Windows Vista has also had similar charges leveled against it: “They changed the start menu!” Never mind the new interfaces being better (in general; some in Vista were pretty neutral), never mind the sudden discoverability of features (in a version of Word prior to 2007, take a 100-page document with headings, tables, and pictures and quickly change the margins, add a table of contents, add an index with index entries, reformat your body text and headings, and then create repeating headings on your tables. And then create a bibliography of sources—and halfway through, change your citation format from MLA to APA). Remember, change is bad.
Thesis: change is bad. However, chanting a slogan is no change from the past, even if such a slogan is, in fact, the word “Change”. Because we know it really won’t.
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