Great song by Bob Weir, vocalist and guitarist for the Grateful Dead. “It’s so easy to slip, it’s so easy to fall. And let your memory drift and do nothing at all”. So appropriate. It’s so easy to let the world skip on by especially if you are a politician and more worried about your career than the people you are in an elected position to watch out for.
So easy too for a democracy to become that in name only. Russia calls itself a democracy. But notice how anyone who opposes the current ruler ends up dead. Usually they get put in jail and then die while there. Sometimes they are poisoned while in other countries, with substances that are only available to defense departments of large countries. Russian laws are there for the aristocracy, not for the people. The people have no rights against the government. Anyone challenging the ruling class is arrested or killed. The exact opposite of what the founding fathers intended when they wrote the American Constitution. A government by the people for the people, not for a select few who work themselves into positions of great wealth and power.
Because many have been left behind in the economy of today they are rightly upset about the way the government is functioning. Currently many people think that having three equal branches of government is too cumbersome and would prefer to have a CEO, or two, to take charge and get things done. It might help in the short term. but down the road when there are no restraints and things aren’t going the right direction it will be a different story. There are very few in history who have given up power once they were offered it. George Washington was one. He could’ve kept the presidency for as long as he lived but he chose not to. He realized that it wasn’t him but the people who needed to be in charge. Leaders of democracies are responsible to the people, who have the ultimate say over them. But if the leader sets out to tear down the curbs and restrictions on his power, and no one stops him on the principle of it, then it won’t be possible to go back. Hitler was elected too and he dissolved the governing body so that he could do what he wanted to without anyone standing in his way.
Our current leaders admire dictators. They think they themselves are good at dictating. They really don’t believe in the three branch system of government. I doubt they have ever read the constitution, or had any understanding of it if they did. It’s not in their nature. One person, or two, with a handful of cronies ruling the empire. That’s how they operate. Because it’s so much easier, of course, than having to convince others who disagree with you, that you are right. We’ve lost, not only the ability to compromise, but the ambition to compromise. All or nothing is the new modus operandi. And every day they are testing the limits of their power, always pushing for more and more, at the expense of the other two governing bodies. Whittle away at the legislature here and a little at the judiciary there and soon neither will have the powers granted by the constitution. All the reins will be in one set of hands.
Is this what America has come to? Are we really willing to give up the greatest democracy in the world because it’s easier than working out a solution we can all agree on?
All it will take from here is to do nothing. But it’s going to take an overwhelming majority to do something, and soon, before there’s nothing anyone can do.