A mythical monster that never could harm you because it can't even touch you. Well, it can touch you for sure. The movie "Ghost" proved that they can touch you, but they don't have the power to keep you paralyzed and downtrodden like we often allow ghost to do as we lazily lay in bed, afraid to even go relieve ourselves because of these unseen spirits.
No matter who you talk to these days, it seems WE all have some complaint about our nation that WE've calculated to be caused by corruption- our code word these days for Government. In the estimation of way too many Americans, Government Holds Our Society in Terror and is the primary reason for most every problem under the sun. If there was something tangible that we mean when we blame government, we might actually be pointing our fingers at something others could see.
Don't misunderstand my position. I recognize that the Tuskegee experiment really happened. I am also very aware of the findings of the Ferguson Report and the scathing indictment that it has become against the police department that killed Michael Brown, as well as the institution of policing that is slowly and quietly admitting to a nationwide practice of some of the same stuff that we found in the Ferguson report.
Policing For Profit was the glaring outtake of the report, a practice that ALL police officers are familiar with rather directly or indirectly. Since police squeal on police even less than the street gangs do, we are left to trust the words of the rare "Rat" that dared to open his mouth and expose the shield for the hope of saving the shield.
These honest cops (aka., Rats) admit that the quota demand for ticket writing sends them to the areas of the most vulnerable, those without the resources to fight off bad policing. A place of least resistance if you will.
Is that true government sanctioned racism or just an unfortunate byproduct of blacks still being mostly poor? In reality, poor people of every race seem to theorize corruption from the unfair collision of poverty and policing. Underneath the surface of such theories, lies the fact that the unfair entity is, once again, our infamous government with its ingrained methods of manipulating money from the masses.
Assuming that policing for profit is an entirely true example of government corruption, I find myself considering ONE key contradiction for this and every other corrupt government theory.
That was not a typing error. For EVERY corrupt government theory, there is but ONE contradiction that makes them all a lazy way of resisting change by overselling our status quo and those who've created it.
You name the theory, I'll name the one simple contradiction because our disgust for government is wide reaching, not just limited to the poor and disenfranchised.
How about Trump's claim that the process of selecting a president is rigged while he continues to try and win at the hands of that system?
Or Bernie's disdain for the superdelegates system, so he waited 37 days to concede the nomination to Hillary so he could have time to court those same delegates that he disdains?
Or Hillary's challenge of the Citizens United ruling while stretching it's limits New England Patriot style for the sake of down ballot fund raising? Or her promise to maintain and strengthen regulations on the banks all while they bankroll her campaign to become president?
Yet, these are just the boogey monsters of our presidential candidate's; their personal, pre-made excuse they use for how Government is Holding Our Society in Terror. You see, the really sad aspect of their GHOST and our's, is that they are all an illusion and nothing more than the excuse WE use when get socially and politically lazy, stay in bed and get all pissy, because WE just couldn't have our own political way.
Nobody every complains about government when government does what they want it to do. Listening to those angry Libertarians, you would think that- other than the 2nd Amendment- the government was ill-conceived from the founding since the same Founding Father's who warned about the tyranny of men and how it is inclined to oppress, also wrote the damn document that allowed for all the tyranny and oppression they predicted. Was there no way to stop tyrannical men, or are they nothing more than a fear instilled from the start?
Our Constitution ratified both slavery and suffrage. It was molded with the notion that certain truths are self evident, but quickly corrected it's own language when those truths were not made evident enough. Among the corrections was the 2nd Amendment, which is widely questioned for it's intent, but not by those who find it to be the most brilliant piece of thought that lives in the document. Through it, some see all other aspects of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of happiness as possible.
Yet, our Founders did not include it from the start?
Some credit our greatness to the Founders, or blame our weakness on their followers who dealt with slavery, and expanded voting for everyone instead of just those deemed smart enough to know better. That remains the mentality that comes to oppose our current rise of ballot initiatives or Direct Democracy. For every modern legislative mistake created through Direct Democracy, traditionalists complain that people are just too unaware to be trusted with leading themselves in this fashion.
If there was a flawless blueprint for government, we would already have it in use. All self governance is inherently flawed, but it beats oligarchy. Ask the Founders. They knew flexibility would be our strength, and that no government will flex without force. The Constitution of the U.S. was always instilled with an evolutionary design. What that means is, WE had the power to force out slavery, and will never be a slave to our own government because WE are our own government and the recipients of our own forces for change.
By the people, For the people is not just a cool slogan, it is a mandate that is achieved through ONE magical provision. WHICH ONE?
Before I share it with you, keep in mind that this provision too was NOT written into the original Constitution. The ONE provision that insures WE are never a victim of our own government was written into the Bill of Rights, and the Bill of Rights was retrofitted into the Constitution in 1791, four years after the Constitution was originally ratified (1787). If you are someone who actually values our Bill of Rights, you should recognize them as vital fixes to an evolutionary, but flawed document.
Some often look upon the brilliance of our founding as something divine and unworthy of challenge. I see the divine blessing of America as our humility to correct our wrongs with a guiding document flexible enough to be fixed, as the absolute strength of this nation. What our Founder's achieved with the first magical amendment to the original plan was an excuse free nation, a band of people that would always be challenged to give voice to the changes they demand.
The First Amendment
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Prohibits the making of any law respecting an establishment of religion, impeding the free exercise of religion, abridging the freedom of speech, infringing on the freedom of the press, interfering with the right to peaceably assemble or prohibiting the petitioning for a governmental redress of grievances.In one fail swoop, the First Amendment destroys 'blame the government' excuses and continues to contradict every last one of you who still tries to sell the theory that government is inherently corrupt.
Flawed? Always has been.
Corrupt?
No corrupt government would leave the first amendment unchanged.
If you are as hardcore as some of those Illuminati or Area 54 conspiracy theorist', you also have to accept that you found your own theory details and the corresponding Photoshop picture because of our free and unfettered press.
When situation demands, WE the People still have the power to stand up and be heard, even before we've ironed out the details of our complaint. Though we often question the strength of our voice and our vote, it's mostly because that makes it easier to not speak up or vote when necessary...or to point fingers when we do both but still lose.
The BLM (Black Lives Matter) organization became necessary as a call to duty when Trayvonn Martin was killed in 2013. By the time Michael Brown Jr. lost his life in 2015, BLM was ready to FULLY exercise their First Amendment duty to America and to themselves, even if few of us knew of them.
Ironically, it has been from the impact of two recent deaths of blacks at the hand of police, and the legion of video images of white people taking to the front lines of the BLM cause, that has opened our hearts to the same message that started with Trayvonn's death.
In reality, the message truly started in the 70's under Stokely Carmichael and the Black Panthers and probably long before that too if you consider MLK's and the civil right pleas against violence of the 60's, but somehow we finally hear the message and seem open to the potential for real change? Was the change we are approaching simply waiting for white people to lead the charge? Who knows...who cares?
Change is always possible in a government of the people, by the people. You would think that our 1.3 million officers of the law across the nation would be in the forefront of helping reduce the number of guns on the street that could be used someday to kill them. Yet, many of those same cops also seem to be the NRA gun lovers who would prefer cops that are anxious, edgy and increasingly in harms way above fighting to get some of these guns of war off of the streets. While we all work to legislate against razed gun violence and violence from suspects under watch, cops think more respect is all they require.
No matter. The actual voices that are actually rumbling for something to get done, actually got both liberals and conservatives in Washington to draft and vote on gun restriction bills recently. Neither side could agree on one of the four options they had, but getting something so polarizing to the stage of an actual vote is a significant victory that doesn't happen in a government conspiring one way or another. Fixing guns in America could come to be much like the highly debated Bill of Rights itself. After years and years of rigorous debate, we finally came to bipartisan agreement and ratified the Bill of Rights, the most important aspect of our entire Constitution.
That was government then, and this is government now. A place where good people gather to govern.
It is also that dreaded, but magical GHOST that we run from when we're fearful, but chase after once we learn to appreciate it for what it is worth. Like a ghost, our government has the power to reflect back on history and use it as a guide for the future. In fact, the government is best when functioning as our friendly ghost, using the clear trail of history to pave a path towards a mirky future.
Unless, of course, you're among those who dread government, in which case you see it as something more than just all of our friends and family that work there. For every area of waste and corruption there are areas of benevolence and provision that come from government; benevolence and provision that we've not quite figured out how to accomplish absent the design of government. Even you smaller government types can't quite agree on what area to slice away first.
Are there flaws in such a model?
The major flaw to our design is that most of us think government is only mildly functional when our chosen party is in control. Our government is actually no more flawed than humanity at large, which is mostly full of really good people trying to navigate the hurdles that a small percentage of bad people create. Because we change our opinion of societal success as often as we change presidents, much of our current trials come from our twisted perspective in which we "see the extremes in others while seeing the best of intentions in ourselves" (George W. Bush)
Government didn't purposefully breed those bad people who take advantage of leaks and loopholes in the system, nor did government intentionally imbue itself with so many leaks and loopholes. What matters most is that our government is not immune to the lessons of history. WE will rise and fall with the tides of life, and the focus of the greater good.
...and yes, governments do fall. Keep that in mind the next time you decide to convince yourself that your vote and your voice have little value. Either our fate is NOT actually in our own hands and we are all actually doomed just like some of you say- or the government that caused all of this is also our only hope to fix it?
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