Politics today is as dysfunctional as it has ever been and there is no evidence that improvements are on the way. The media continues to look for evidence of cooperation “across the aisle” or some “bipartisan” effort somewhere in the legislative process – anywhere! Of course, we would do well to remember that it takes a majority of legislators to get anything done, unless you’re in the Senate and then it takes 60 senators, so when we start looking for evidence of an American spirit we should not pay attention to individual legislators.
If we are honest with ourselves we must admit that the problem is the factions. The special interest groups of all stripes have hijacked our government for their own purposes. Republicans, Democrats, NRA, MADD, Pro-life, Pro-Choice, big business, etc. are all factions with an agenda they would like to shove down everybody else’s throat. These factions have assembled around their single minded principle of life and they are in no mood to compromise. They have gerrymandered the precincts and voting locations to favor their particular way of thinking and give their candidate a better chance of winning the next election. And we have allowed them to get away with it.
The American people haven’t yet had enough of the political theater we witness daily and we know that because the complaining is still a bit sparse and not very specific. For example, when the complaint goes something like “nothing ever gets done in Washington” and only one in five or ten people are offering the thought, the mood isn’t yet reaching a critical mass. When every American decides to add his or her voice of disgust to the conversation as freely as the ideologues through around their snappy little sound bites, we will be ready to get something done.
“We don’t have a revenue problem – we have a spending problem” according to the ideologues and then the cuts they propose go straight at the programs that protect our most vulnerable citizens. They say “the government doesn’t create jobs” and then their supporters, who are supposed to be the ones who know how to create jobs, are found to be cutting the workforce. And, they get away with it because the majority of Americans aren’t paying attention, but that is starting to change.
When we buy into the factional principles, we are buying into some form of anti-American sentiment and the more rigid our stance the more anti-American is our behavior. You can’t really be just a little bit anti-American or a little bit factional in your thinking because even the slightest amount of such thinking is at the expense of our most vulnerable citizens. We need to stop thinking and acting like we are the only citizen that matters and recognize that we are all in this together. If the boat sinks, we all drown.
The sausage grinder is broken, will you help to fix it?
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