Let me “splain” something. Leadership is about people. Bureaucracy is not. Just like it mattered far less than we think who won the election, it matters just as little if the president is impeached or not. Now I know what you’re thinking, or feeling rather — that so much hangs in the balance with immigration and climate and LGBT rights and the price of Chinese tea at Walmart. These things are important, but almost unrelated to the actual power and job description of the POTUS. We have turned any man in the oval office into a Messiah in one view, and in the other an Anti-Christ. Fighting him has become the ultimate goal and final boss of the video game that has become America in our minds.
It’s like the whole government has become a reality show, and people are addicted to the detriment of their mental and emotional well-being.
Our obsession with heroes and villains will be the death of us, all eyes forward while we are stabbed in the back by the people really in charge. For many months now, people are talking about FBI directors and lawyers and whistleblowers like they are trading baseball cards. We never even heard of (most or all of) these people until recently and we have all sorts of opinions about who is lying and who is telling the truth.
It is the PROCESS that desperately needs reform. We forget — or don’t care — that we are playing a game rigged by others from the start, more concerned about perceived winnings than making better rules that work. That’s why even things like voting have become a feel-good symbolic gesture at most, uninformed consent at worst. We keep doing it, and armchair gladiating for this or that party or person, thinking this “participation” is effective or necessary for change.
What’s the definition of insanity again?
It’s funny(?) to me that the poll in the margin about voting for the lesser of two evils doesn’t have any votes for the last choice – “defeating the greater evil is more important than voting for someone I want”. I mean at least how I interpret it that means everyone would rather do something they want, even if it supports an outcome that is the greater “evil”. And yet that, in my opinion, at least in the mundane sense, is at the heart of the problem. Possibly though I misinterpret that last question because I am projecting a lot of my bias onto it because I think the character of most people when it comes to Liberty, is that of a tyrant. Most people (and many who in day to day life can be kind and think they want to see outside themselves) go to vote like they are supporting their favorite sports team. Very rarely does someone step back and say “Forget about me, forget about what I might like, but what is the right thing to do here, what is the Fair thing to do, what is the Just thing to do (and by Just I do not mean justice and by fair I do not mean equal, and by right I do not mean according to someone’s sense of morality). Inequity is a word that comes to mind. Just in the meaning that those who know it don’t need to define it for each other. Freedom (Liberty) is another word that again is either known correctly and therefore identically or is not known. Basically, people vote for what they want because they are tyrants and care only for what they think is right (or right for them, or what is right to do to others, etc.), but rarely if ever question what basis they have for thinking they know what is right, and that’s assuming they define right beyond “what they think is best for them”.
I agree very much with what you wrote. I cry because I fear the fight here is lost to the majority and even the ones who mean to help don’t see their bigotry and unfairness. I don’t know how it came about, and maybe it somehow prevents us from descending too far down while it also limits our ascension, but we have given the masses, the same ones who would throw rotten fruit at a condemned man before he was hung, the same ones who would hang the man, the same ones who would sentence a man to be hung, the same ones who would allow such a sentencing as law, we have given them a say in the lives of us all. We let loose the people who believe the right to having an opinion is the same thing as the right to their opinion being valid. We may as well have staffed NASA via a lottery and expected they would know how to collect particles of dark matter from a Van Allen belt.
The majority vote is the ultimate tyrant, for how can one stop the majority when it requires the majority to do it? (chipping away every day, little by little, planting the seeds of Love, of Kindness, of Fairness, pointing out the horrors, the hypocrisies, the blindness…I guess…but it seems the sea washes everything away. It is like fighting the ocean with a sword). It’s just a shame. All that said, I’d still die fighting for their Freedom, fighting to keep them from pain. American or any other person or thing. Sorry for all that, it just comes out like vomit sometimes.
Love, Nick
Oh yeah, and One for All and All for One.