Shoot, you're only killing a man.
Our system is fundamentally flawed. Our politicians are creatures forced by habit to using words to soil the truth in the pursuit of power; people with integrity are pushed out before they can make a difference. Greed is so prolific that it no longer enrages. Corruption is the fuel in the engine of state, and the technicians we hired to fix it will not. There is no accountability. No impetus for them to improve their performance. They use their position and borrowed authority to rob us of the future, because they have been shown time and again that they can. That we will not punish them. They suffer a week or so of embittered mumbling from the populace, and mock outrage from the joke we call "the media". They then obfuscate the issue by pushing an emotionally charged topic like abortion or gay marriage. And it may not be their fault.
We are all descended from millions of years of the stubborn. The passionate. The violent. The deceptive. Those are the creatures that survived, and those traits are passed to us. Add to that the fact that we are creatures addicted to progress. It is through technological progress that we stand atop the world today. No other species on this planet can make such a boast. With our hands and with our minds we have shaped this place in our image. So the people we pick to lead us forward naturally use their position selfishly. They are bred to. They line their pockets with our work. And the few times we grumble about the expense, they use the novelty of some new scandal, or some new hate to move us along to something new, and in this way the past is forgotten. We let them rob us because we are too apathetic and too intellectually lazy to create a new system.
"It makes more sense to tweak the system we have. We can fix the problems of the day. We don't have to scrap the whole thing. It requires much less effort our way." No. Wrong. You are treating the symptoms, not the disease. We do it your way, the patient will die. We must find a system that requires leaders to lead with the point of view of putting the people first. We must create some incentive that will force politicians to improve more than their stock portfolios. And don't whinge to me about the incentive being how bad politicians can be voted out. That requires a politically active population. America can't vote for anything other than American Idol participants, and we aren't even ashamed of it anymore. Less than a third of our citizens even bother to vote. Again, we are too intellectually lazy to maintain the vigilance required to watch our politicians. So we must find something else. And damn me, but I don't know what that is.
We are all descended from millions of years of the stubborn. The passionate. The violent. The deceptive. Those are the creatures that survived, and those traits are passed to us. Add to that the fact that we are creatures addicted to progress. It is through technological progress that we stand atop the world today. No other species on this planet can make such a boast. With our hands and with our minds we have shaped this place in our image. So the people we pick to lead us forward naturally use their position selfishly. They are bred to. They line their pockets with our work. And the few times we grumble about the expense, they use the novelty of some new scandal, or some new hate to move us along to something new, and in this way the past is forgotten. We let them rob us because we are too apathetic and too intellectually lazy to create a new system.
"It makes more sense to tweak the system we have. We can fix the problems of the day. We don't have to scrap the whole thing. It requires much less effort our way." No. Wrong. You are treating the symptoms, not the disease. We do it your way, the patient will die. We must find a system that requires leaders to lead with the point of view of putting the people first. We must create some incentive that will force politicians to improve more than their stock portfolios. And don't whinge to me about the incentive being how bad politicians can be voted out. That requires a politically active population. America can't vote for anything other than American Idol participants, and we aren't even ashamed of it anymore. Less than a third of our citizens even bother to vote. Again, we are too intellectually lazy to maintain the vigilance required to watch our politicians. So we must find something else. And damn me, but I don't know what that is.