On America’s modern political failures — it’s not too late
Here we are in 2016, ready to elect new leaders, and what a choice it has become. We look out at the political landscape and question not only these people who have risen to the top of each party, but also the ideological landscape of our country. It’s not really about who is a demagogue or an oligarch. It is not about religion and science. It isn’t even about the latest gaffe or headline. It’s about where we want our future to go, and whether we look at the past with longing for good-old-days and the way things were, or as a source of problems, ad-hoc solutions and wanting to learn from our mistakes.
That is where we are divided. That is also where we need to pay the most attention: what brought about the good times and the problems. What happened just beforehand that led to the good and bad we remember? We need to acknowledge, if not accept, that absolutely *everything* about the world and the country has changed since those days of yore. There are literally billions more people in the world since the 1950’s. We can see the differences every day in our cities and our farms, the man-made disasters and accomplishments, the weather, nature and our most basic science that the world itself is changing before our very eyes. There are too many of us in the world now not to change it.
Are we so eager for a return of simpler times in the past that we would welcome back the racism and injustices inflicted on every minority? “The tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free” have never stopped changing the demographics of our country. Are we ready for when ‘white people’ become the minority in America as they once were before colonialism and Manifest Destiny? And will we be treated with the same ‘kindness’ and ‘compassion’ with which we have treated others, or might we someday move on from such shallow distinctions as race for anything more than tracking ancestry?
What would our Founding Fathers say?
The hue of your skin says nothing about the quality of your mind. Yet, to call out the absurd ways people are treated differently based on cosmetic features is often labeled as ‘liberal’. To act in favor of personal liberty and responsibility instead of government decree or regulation is seen as ‘conservative’. ‘Us vs. Them’ mentality rules the day, and many other qualities and beliefs now have ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ connotations. A false dichotomy if there ever was one that we as Americans have internalized.
If “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men (all people, really) are created equal (as human beings), and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”, then why should any person or group in power not reflect this? If “in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity” each party of our government can only support a small fraction of these, why would we bring any modern party identity or political ideology into our personal mindset? Checks and balances were never supposed to be perpetual deadlock. Have we abandoned all hope at following our Founding Fathers into the future?
I wish I could call myself ‘conservative’. I can wax nostalgic with the best of them. Changes are happening so fast in our technology and our society that it’s hard to believe how far we have come in the span of a few short decades, and not always for the better. Our technology-obsessed youths have changed even more. On one hand we have those who are averse to change and urge caution or regression in society, while supporting the eagerness of corporations to change as fast as possible and be the most profitable business they can be. On the other we have people who tell us that society needs to change, and yet our corporate greed and selfishness must be slowed and controlled lest it endanger our very civilization. We have the ability and awareness to track changes year by year, track what our supposed ‘leaders’ promise, and what (if anything) is done about them. What our American forefathers put in writing states that the current alienating two-party two-ideology system goes against everything they wanted for us.
I wish I could call myself ‘liberal’, but I recognize that change for the sake of change invites failure when you ignore the past. The changes we need today, however, have been snowballing threats throughout our history. Our Founding Fathers stated that ‘Life’ should be an inalienable right, yet our government wages constant wars. Wars kill our youth or turn many into traumatized and disabled veterans in need of ongoing support from the government. We have among the highest cost of medical care in the world and we are still indirectly ‘at war’ with ‘drugs’. Attempts made to fix these were met with jeers more often than a nod that at least someone was taking responsibility and trying to help. Liberty has become the haven of anarchists and terrorists who would sooner tear down the world than take personal responsibility to help build a better one.
And how are people to pursue happiness if they cannot afford food, or a roof over their head, or else work two part-time jobs with no benefits just to make ends meet? How are they to pull themselves up by their bootstraps while weighed down with the heavy debt our society has saddled them with? How do you pursue happiness when you need credit cards just to survive until the end of the month, or have a home mortgage to be paid (with interest) to the bank over decades, or better yet, student loans accumulated while pursuing the gilded carrot that higher education has become? Debt is the stick wielded to keep us under the glass ceiling dividing the upper class from everyone else. Those of us enslaved by debt can only look up and marvel at those free of it. There is precious little life, liberty, or property left for everyone else when corporations and the government own the debt.
Hell is other Americans
Some people look to ancient texts full of kindness and wisdom as a guide for bringing positive ancient ideals into a changed future. There are also folks who use these texts and mix in modern beliefs as excuses for personal selfishness to dispense century-old racism/sexism or reinterpreted millennia-old religion onto others. Violence ensues when the others refuse. Still others prefer a brand new vision of the future with all the terrible and wonderful possibilities that might hold. Some even mix and match. None of these are knee-jerk reactions to anything. They are well thought out, planned and instigated by their respective groups. These are the roots behind talking points of our culture and our election cycle: marriage rights, tax methods, foreign policy, education reform, etc. These are also not the most pressing problems we face today.
The largest problem is that our leaders and politicians are too often hypocrites. They tell us every lie that we want to hear, threaten us with every fear we are afraid of, and mislead us with ‘facts’ in a time overloaded with information. We are so divested that it has become nothing but a circus for us to watch and despair over. When all that’s left is despair, why wouldn’t we long for times tinted with the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia? Why think of new solutions to old problems when smart people on both sides of the aisle have been failing for so long? Our side deserves another chance to screw it up in all the same-yet-subtly-different ways! Why wouldn’t we recommit ourselves to religious beliefs in tumultuous times when our politicians will exploit every advantage instead of leading by example?
The omnipresent modern media will happily force-feed you all the ‘answers’ to everything, no thinking required. He said this! Her emails said that! One will do X, but the other will do Y and Z! Don’t find new solutions. Don’t get up and do something your party doesn’t already support. Just sit. Follow. Let the leaders lead and do nothing to actually help your fellow American. It’s not your responsibility. You shouldn’t have to take any responsibility. Blame the other side for everything that goes wrong instead of working together to make a difference.
The time has come when we can no longer stand idly by while our politicians tell us to love America, but hate half of Americans. If we are to love our country, we need to do what’s best for all Americans and not just our political party. We need to recognize that charisma most often means coercion. It does not mean authenticity, loyalty, compassion, or intelligence. We need to ask big questions and come up with more complete answers than ‘yes’ and ‘no’ to everything. To answer with ‘what’, ‘how’, ‘when’ and most importantly ‘why’ change the things we need to, but also ‘if not, then why not’.
A government of the rich, by and for the rich.
Modern politics is a web of money in which the politicians, lobbyists, pundits and sociopathic corporations will suck the life out of everything we hold dear if we don’t cut their strings. How did our Founding Father’s desire to ‘establish justice’ lead to our police forces getting military equipment for crowd suppression? It sure doesn’t ‘insure domestic tranquility’ as the Preamble of our Constitution would suggest. Providing for ‘the common defense’ has somehow become a never-ending list of wars on foreign soil. The two-party/ideology system doesn’t promote the general welfare or secure liberty for our posterity until the two are ready to work together toward the common good.
Most importantly of all, we need to cut through all the political and media garbage heaped far and wide to find the cold hard facts. We need to know what our government is doing, how they are doing it, and what they could be doing better. We need to know where the money is going, who is getting kickbacks or subsidies, who is paying off our politicians, and who is really in control because it is quite clear that we no longer are. We need to accept that our leaders and politicians are human and capable of mistakes, but also rich, powerful, and largely out of touch with the general population. They are more likely than most to be greedy, selfish, and in it for either the dopamine rush of wielding power over others or the opportunity to funnel more money and power to themselves and their friends.
Will we allow the destruction of our middle class to continue, and essentially return to a time of nobles and serfs? Will we be so consumed by capitalism that we realize too late that only the top 0.1% can afford the goods and services we produce? If so, then when our economy inevitably fails from lack of money being circulated, we as part of the masses will have earned our place in the perpetual cycle of poverty. We will have been so afraid or apathetic of our government that we prove through those we elect that it can’t provide what we need. We will vote with our every dollar to support those who cut every corner to keep every fraction of a penny, no matter the social or environmental cost. We will live in (Russia?) a country where political and corporate leaders keep us in check by manipulating our beliefs using carefully controlled media, exploiting phobias of others-turned-enemies and pushing blind nationalism regardless of the state of our nation.
I wish I could ignore the dire need for improvements to our government and blindly follow what worked in decades past when the world is now so different. I am not solely ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ in the modern sense. I can’t even call myself ‘moderate’, because doing so implies that something centered between the present extremes must be the right answer. I know that some changes I don’t like are inevitable, and I accept that. Things are changing now that I cannot accept, and I say that we can’t let our beloved country continue going down this road. Nature shows us that if you cannot tolerate changes in the world, you die or you change the world around you. If America can’t come to terms with its own corruption, our cultural and economic globalization will destroy economies and governments around the globe in addition to the lives and livelihoods of Americans. It isn’t about what side you’re on. Believe it or not, we really are all in this together.
We need to do what’s best for America, and that means standing up and being part of the solution. The most important solutions are pretty simple. Get money out of politics. Stop electing politicians who shout sweet nothings into their microphones. Stop letting our leaders and the media tell us who the bad guys are. Get rid of gerrymandering and voting proxies like the Electoral College and ‘superdelegates’. Lastly, elect people willing to work together and make America better for ALL Americans! Only together do we have the power to oppose the oligarchy and corporatocracy’s complete dominance over us. Only together can we fight this modern corruption. Don’t leave me standing alone.
