When good people do nothing

In college my minor was political science. Despite what some folks may think of liberal

college education I came out of that with the idealized concept of Congress and especially the Senate as arbiters and leaders and, yes, statesmen at the national and international level. Imagine the shock of realization that they saw their jobs as selfishly channeling as much federal money as possible into their own districts.

Alaska's gang proved particularly adept at that. While they connived to extract every possible dollar out of the federal government into something for Alaska, they mostly voted along the lines of whatever party they thought they represented, statesmanship be damned, morality too.

But the evolution didn't stop there. In the years that followed that first lucid non-idealistic awareness, the representation changed to what exists now, where they represent not the people, barely their own districts anymore and now represent the monied interests of the country, legislating for huge corporations and ultra rich barons who in turn fund the campaigns that keep the people who represent them in power while they rake in huge profits and impoverish their own employees.

And the nation has blithely followed along. A noisy ignorant plurality of Americans vote against their own interests because of the manufactured fears along religious, racial and patriotic lines. Their rulers twist every negative issue to keep those fears alive. A football player kneels during the national anthem to bring attention to the racism in this country and is vilified for disrespect to the anthem and the flag and the autocrats silence the original message in a cacophony of patriotic shouting.

We even shrug off the massacre of our children by gun-toting maniacs, while those supposedly representing the masses, actually only represent a well funded- organization that represents gun manufacturers and uses their money to influence those public representatives.

We cruelly separate children from their parents in the fear of too many brown people coming into the country. Meanwhile crops die in the fields because no red-blooded American wants to pick them — that's menial labor always done by those same people we are now sending back to their own countries to be murdered while their children languish in fear behind the wires of what can only be called concentration camps.

And what does a large segment of that coalition of the rich whose whole existence is based on the moral of "love thy neighbor" do? Nothing. Nada. Oh yeah one of them pleaded with his followers to provide him with enough money to buy an $80 million private jet airplane. Maybe that would bring him closer to god, because nothing he does on terra firma is going to if the teachings are correct. The rest could care less as they worship in billion-dollar cathedrals, the kind Jesus and Sampson tried to tear down.
An for crying out loud we have to teach our children how to stay alive when someone starts shooting up their schools. Is there anything imaginably worse than that?

There are so many instances where the oligarchy has mistreated the people who support it with their labor and their acquiescence, they can't all be listed in a single polemic that anyone would read.

It has caused a national malaise, a sort of background depression that comes to the fore every so often when the #fakepresident that ignorant plurality elected does something so outrageous we almost can't believe it. Consider this as a prime example. That #fakepresident is about to attend a historic meeting with the dictator of North Korea. This has not been done since Korea was left divided by a hot war and then a cold war since the 1950s, with a history dating into the mid 1800s. What does this #fakepresident say and do with that for background? He says he doesn't need to and won't do any preparations for the meeting. He will "read" his counterpart and that is all he needs. What could go wrong with that? Yet we shrug our shoulders and pass it off as "well that's Trump." Then we wait anxiously to see how what outrage he commits this time.

The question is what is the next step in that progression of the evolution by government representation in this country? All of the options except one are almost unthinkable. Photographs of children behind chain link in America today raise too-vivid parallels to those photos we have seen in history books of children in their striped outfits staring out from behind barbed wire in Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Are we going to keep shrugging our shoulders and letting it happen? That's what Germans did in the years leading to that great war

That one option is out there, but when 67 percent of those eligible fail to vote even in a presidential election, what hope is there? It can be changed but it is going to take an effort, even if it is only to take an hour out of our precious lives to vote in November, while we are still allowed to vote. The alternative is unthinkable. If we are going to act in fear let's make sure we fear the right thing. The longer we let it go on, the longer it's going to take to repair the damage.
Here's a start. This summer students who started the March for our Lives movement after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High school in Parkland, Florida, are taking a bus tour to register young people to vote. They plan to visit 20 states with more than 50 stops and also every congressional district in Florida. The first stop is June 15 in Chicago. They are targeting the four million people who will turn 18 this year. Now there's a voting bloc.
And take heart, things like this worked once before:


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