Donald Trump put up a video of President Barack Obama being arrested by the FBI in the Oval Office as you can see in the screen grab. Trump is exceedingly happy about it, of course. The video starts with Obama and a number of Democrats all saying "No...
What the hell am I going to do about the way things are? I can’t fix it. I inherited it. And the dumb people are taking over. I’ll spend my knowledge but life is too damn short to go on “fighting the good fight” when the majority is morons.
As he said, “please get involved in your local community if you aren’t already.”
He didn’t say “fix the problem.”
There were more words than that. But even a local investment should not be my responsibility. I pay taxes and work and have a kid with hobbies. The system was designed to not be in the middle of all the time and monitor it like it’s on life support. The system was designed to pay attention every six months to a year and hire someone to represent our interests. Not make it a damn hobby.
You make it sound like this system was designed with your interests in mind.
The problem is, the system is broken without direct participation, and most people expect it to just work for them with no more effort than paying most taxes and obeying most laws (and possibly voting).
That is not how it was intended to work. It was never meant to be a high maintenance endeavor. It was meant to be representatively maintained with the constituents in mind.
I believe that what they’re trying to say is this: keeping a government running requires more than just voting for whoever you think will do a decent job every year or two, because it, ultimately, doesn’t matter what Hamilton, Locke, Madison, De Tocqueville and other influential philosophers of politics might have intended, because any system that is only checked once a year is a fragile system, prone to corruption. It requires constant maintenance, bug fixes, security updates, and independent reviews. It requires not only that every part of it has the light of day cast upon it, but that the people at every level actually look and act on what the light of day reveals.
Whether you or the framers like it or not, the united states is no longer a representative republic. The people being elected are not representing the people. They are representing corporations, private interests and foreign oligarchs who pay them to give them the sweet meats of the treasury and leaving the ovens untended, but continuing to shovel the coals of our taxes into the ovens, because then they can make their own pies. The US government as it stands is committed to deregulation, to abandonment of all duty, and that laissez-faire attitude is by design, not of the framers or the people, but by the design of the corpocratic interests that have captured the government, media, and every other facet of our lives, including even our private actions and thoughts through a paucity of data privacy.
And I’m saying I don’t really give a fuck enough about some dumbass theoretics of imaginary lines and laws. I do what I can. I vote. I don’t abuse people. I take of my community by giving back with what little I can. But I’m not going to over extend myself. I did that when I was young and the movement did not succeed. I’m not wasting the rest of my days fighting some dumb shit that is pulled by corporate greed.
That’s fair. I feel like you might benefit from reading Cloud Atlas. It’s… apropos. That, and A Canticle for Leibowitz have basically formed my worldview since reading them.
I think that the philosophy can basically be summed up with the quote “You have to do whatever you can’t not do.” For us, that’s raging against the dying of the light. We can’t not. But for some, it’s hard enough just trying to survive and be decent to those around us, and that life is not without virtue. By each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.