We all have rituals of sorts, one that I enjoy is my morning coffee and scanning through the headlines on cnn.com, digg.com, and maybe catch an hour of the NPR Morning Edition audio stream. This ritual of late has not been bringing me the satisfaction it once did. Lately it has been an entirely unpleasant ordeal, yet one I cannot forgo.
My stomach turns and I feel sick, physically ill at times. The knee jerk disbelief of what I read quickly fades as it is replaced by the cold stark reality of what is happening.
So what is making me so ill? This is where you call me crazy: The status quo is making me ill.
Oh shit you say, here comes another nutjob, another conspiracy theorist. Yea I said the same thing…
So let me relate a story: My wife and I were in Jamacia for our honeymoon in May, 2003, this is the same time the Iraq war started.. And we met an fellow from England, who asked a pretty simple question of us; “What do you think of your country invading Iraq”, my response; “It is not right”, he then asked “So what are you going to do about it”, my response, “Nothing…”
I think at that exact moment in time a little piece of me died, because what could I do? What could anyone do about anything, nothing, why-The status quo. We have become complacent, we have been hyptnotized into a lathargic state of indifference. We watch, we accept, we fail to question. We just let the world go on around us without making an effort to influence it. The status quo makes us feel safe, secure, we can rationalize it. The soft embrace of stillness is preferable to the harsh wind of change. Change is scary, dissent is unpatriotic, change takes effort, is it not so much nicer to just zone out and watch a movie, filter out and ignore anything that makes you think. Thats right… buy more, it is the american way. The status quo is a system of control.
Where am I going with this? I feel sick to my stomach when I read the days headlines because I do not like what I see, and I feel powerless to change it. I have been imprinted with a notion of democracy and that the voice of the people matters. But what about the voice of the person? The corruption, the money, the scandal, the lies, the influence, the deceit, the bloat, the agenda, the status quo.. it has always been this way. And it always will be this way because it is so entrenched that one with even the best intentions cannot move it.
Am I the only one that spends his time during a long drive thinking about how I would do things differently if I were president of the USA? Or a congressman. Great idea right, join the system to change the system from within the system. To get elected I would have to utilize all the things that make me sick. Pander to lobbyists, buddy up to special interests, walk the line of political correctness: Would you vote for me if my campaign platform is representational of what I think. “This system is fucked, and I am using it to get elected so I can change it”
Would I just fall victim to the system once I was in it?
There is no integrity left in our political system, and it makes me sick that I feel powerless to do anything about it.
How can I enact change. How can you enact change.
I know its hard out there but you can do it. I have faith in you.
Your proud wife,
Sally
I try to stay out of politics, mainly because I am just as powerless. I would rather focus my energy on getting myself in a position to change things rather than wasting it on feeling bad about how things are right now.
What we need is some serious re-evaluation on transparency and accountability in government. We have the technology today to give citizens more direct control of their government. If this is can happen in any government, it would make sense to see America on the forefront.
No…..you’re not the only one. I spend a great deal of time thinking about how I would change things in this dreadful world we’ve built around ourselves. It feels like its too late and too big. I don’t believe that we can change the government. There’s too many people with big money working behind the scenes to keep it all where they want it to be. We would have to put in an ‘earnings cap’ to knobble them just a little bit and thats never going to happen.
I keep wishing I had a enough money to buy my own country, move my family there and start again. I’m beginning to think that the movie, ‘The village’ has some merit in it. And then reality reasserts itself.