An Old Rant

I sent this out to some friends last summer; the sentiment remains fresh.

This morning I went to check e-mails and there were no less than a dozen from different people, all across the country, expressing their disgust with government and politicians.  My question, and I ask it very seriously, is: where did this sad state of affairs come from?  Did this situation just appear out of thin air?  Did something happen to all these people to make them so unacceptable?  No, America is getting the leadership it wants, that’s how democracy works!  The short answer is that Americans have lost the ability to govern themselves.  I am not talking about violence in the streets but the ability for a large group of people to make good decisions.  That’s what self-government is.

Just because they made a decision does not make it a good one; this used to be known as “tyranny of the majority”.  If government’s job is to do good and punish evil, then it is the electorate’s job to elect people that can do good and punish evil.  Americans consistently elect governments that, at best, cannot distinguish between good and evil and, at worst, actively do evil and punish the good.  This is not the government’s or the politician’s fault.  This is a democracy and the majority of Americans support them.  How do I know this?  Because they keep electing them.  In all my life I have, with few if any exceptions, seen a US administration that was not corrupt or incompetent.  And how did this happen?  They were all elected; hand picked by the American people.

So, what is my point?  In all of history, no democracy has ever lasted more than two or three hundred years.  America is not an exception.  When a people no longer have the will for (or cannot tell the difference between) doing good and punishing evil, they are history, literally.  When I get a in-box full of e-mails like this morning, I have to shake my head and go for the delete key.  Theoretically the government can be reformed, but how do you reform a whole people?  How does a whole nation regain it’s moral footing?  I really don’t know.