While we’re waiting for members of Congress to change their minds and actually do their jobs, the days are clicking by. While we’re waiting on representatives who have failed us, all we seem to be able to do is wring our hands and whine. What we are not doing is proactively taking responsibility for our crippled, incompetent government.
Now mind you, most of us are looking at this all wrong. We think of elected officials as the government… as them rather than as us. In doing that we are as incompetent as they are. We are their employers. They work for us. They should be fired. We've argued with them enough. The more we argue with them, the weaker we become. As we use our energy to launch email and phone call campaigns, marches, and all the rest… all they have to do is run out the clock. We need to stop this foolishness.
What we need to do is turn our energy and our attention to finding people we can replace them with, just like your employer would do if you were a jerk and needed to be fired. If you couldn’t be removed until your contract ran out, your boss meanwhile would be hell bent on searching for your replacement, so that on the day he could kick you out, your replacement would be right there ready to hit the street running. Our job now should be to find people to represent us who are aligned with the best values we can identify and are not corruptible by the system by which most folks get elected.
If all we do is rant and rave for another 16 months, when election day comes we will have no choice but to put back in office the same people we put there last time… and then what? Same-O, Same-O. How do you expect things to change if we don’t change things and if we don't change?
In my opinion, if you stay aligned with a major political party, that party will not really support any candidate who has not demonstrated party loyalty or pledged to tow the party line. That means you are not likely to be much help in transforming our government from one that doesn’t work for The People to one that does.
We need to convince ourselves and every other honorable, responsible citizen to put our energies where they need to go: we need to clean house, identify a new group of independent qualified citizens who are capable and willing to serve. We need to find a way to elect them to office so we can one day actually have a government in place that will truly be of, by, and for the people. And we need to start now!
