I have expressed this sentiment several times in various forms, and it looks like I will unfortunately have cause to continue expressing it: we are being betrayed!
When I say we, I mean the American People. Not Republicans or Democrats. I mean all of us. We are all being betrayed by our own political system and the politicians that profit from it. See, there is a cancer that started growing around the US Constitution from almost day one. George Washington was wise enough to see it for what it was, and he spoke out against it, but his concerns fell on deaf ears. So the cancer was allowed to grow and spread until it has now become larger and more powerful in many ways than the original system that spawned it.
This cancer is the US Political Party system, and as long as it remains in its current form, no true democracy is possible in America.
The parties exist for one reason only: to consolidate money and power, and thereby ensure their own power and survival. The parties have no vested interest in giving the people what they want. Far from it. Rather, the parties both have a long and tedious record of becoming consumed in their own ideological bickering, the needs and desires of the American people be damned. The events of the past year are a case in point.
Congress has the job of authorizing funding for the federal government. This is one of their basic duties. But rather than finding a way to get this relatively kindergarten level problem resolved, the issue devolved into partisan fighting and bickering that almost resulted in all Federal employees and programs experiencing a pay freeze that would have been catastrophic to our already limping economy. Only in the eleventh hour, when all the politicians realized their jobs were on the line, did they close ranks and DO THEIR DAMN JOBS.
And now they are at it again, and over a very similar issue. This time it is the debt ceiling, but the results threaten to be similar. Their complete unwillingness to actually represent their constituents, and insistence on playing political gamesmanship is likely to take us again to the very brink of disaster before either side will give way. And who suffers in the mean time? The American Middle. Almost all of us.
The parties dictate the votes of our Senators and Congressmen. If a representative steps out of line with their party, they invariably are censured, miss out on funding, lose committee appointments, etc. So in order to be a powerful rep, you have to also be a powerful lackey. And the really anti democratic element is this: the People of the United States of America do not vote for the party leaders. They do that themselves. It is a voting process open to a very few select people, and only to those who are already members. These people then go about the business of making the decisions that rule our lives, and there is little to nothing that we can do to influence their policies.
I seem to remember another time that something similar happened. But that time the closed group was called the British House of Parliament, and the Party Leader was a man named King George. What has happened in the two centuries since then that Americans no longer want democracy? How have we been so duped as to allow these two feuding oligarchies that call themselves Parties to claim possession of our futures and political destinies?
Well, I am not so naive as to believe that the parties will ever willingly release their grasp on power. And as long as they have one another to deflect blame onto, they can convince the American Middle that they are both necessary to prevent some unspeakable but also undefinable ideological horror from sweeping the country. No, I do not think that we have the power, as sad as it is, to dislodge the parties. But there is something I think we can do: we can fire them all.
And that is what I propose. If any employee at any company repeatedly fails to do his job, or even if he puts off doing his job until he has placed the company in a crisis, that man would be fired. He should be fired. And so should our sitting government. We should fire all of them, and keep firing them, until they get the message: we need a government that works for US, not for itself. We need a government that empowers the American People, not the American Politicians.
So in this next election, and every time thereafter, when the government is failing you, protest the only way the system still allows you to - vote against the incumbent. Because as long as the old guard keeps winning, we are telling them one thing clearest of all: that we will continue to allow them to tread and trample all over us.
