All of us are partly to blame for the current Abortion debacle, and you know it.
We love to point fingers at others, probably because that relieves us from the stress and the blame. Yet just like we take pride in the positive outcomes of our nation, the negatives are partly established by all the people of a nation, you and me included.
Take the Russians. They may try to point at Putin after his inevitable suicide attempt, hopefully soon. Yet the Russians have to point at themselves, too, for supporting a dictatorial nation creating one of its darkest pages that will haunt them for at least 40 years.
How are we doing here in the USA? Any dark pages to consider that we are working on?
If we take the abortion debacle, then the first thing to notice is how it was never a politically-settled policy. Our politicians failed us miserably by not ending up providing us a political solution. The courts made their decision — a failure of our democratic system.
Abortion is not the only issue where our politicians showed us their inability to come up with good solutions. In other nations, politicians compromised with one another to come up with abortion policies, often establishing outcomes that delivered the lowest abortion rates in the world. Everyone (almost) happy. That’s democracy in a nutshell.
We? Let’s take a good look in the mirror.
We have a political system that we love and hate. It’s like we are married to good cop & bad cop — bipolar. We know that our marriage is much like doing jail time. The cops have their jobs to do, yet we are the ones not able to leave, not even with the jail doors wide open. We keep listening to our good cop (or even more so to our bad cop) right until we are doing four more years of whatever one of the two cops we married wins out. Let me worry about the kids and You take care of the country.
We point and point and point and point, but never at ourselves. We let go.
We are the ones supporting a political system that definitively has its good aspects. Of course, we don’t want twenty little parties to run our nation amok, right? And, look, we are a leading military nation; we are a leading economic nation.
Yet we are not a leading democratic nation. We suck at being a democratic nation. Our politicians can’t get things done. The Supreme Court has to guide the political way in a democracy? It’s all happening by design, mostly positive, agreed? Yet when the turn is negative, the point is that we don’t say a thing but rather end up pointing, pointing, pointing.
We remain silent thinking it is the best approach because our system is set up for all of us.
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Let’s have another look in the mirror.
Our US Senators are voted in with the support of — on average — 60 percent of the voters. Winner-takes-all. That means that half these winning voters get their Democratic Senators and half these winning voters get their Republican Senators.
Did you do the math? Did you see which group is the largest group of voters?
The 40 percent of the voters that went home empty-handed, that is the largest group of us voters. The 60 percent of voters got split in half and these two parts are each 10 percent smaller than the largest group of voters that got nothing at all.
- We, this largest group of voters, voted and got nothing we wanted.
That means that either red-or-blue party can lead the nation simply by getting the right 30 percent of the voters in their specific line of sight.
In Sweden, the majority decision is supported by 50 percent at least of all voters. They have full representation. We do not.
Imagine how abortion can line up 30 percent of the voters.
Only 60 percent of the voters will ever get the one they wanted sitting in a seat, and then — no surprise — half of them is all it takes to make the majority.
- How can the Democrats win on abortion?
They can’t because they are an inclusive big-tent party. They don’t have the 30% backbone of dropping everything else and going for the win. For the Democrats, it takes 70 percent to win the majority on abortion. They will not succeed, partly because politicians cannot write abortion policy into law.
Was it mentioned how our system elects so many female representatives that we are an astonishing 76th leader for females sitting in elected seats in the world? Obviously, we are a leading nation, right?
We spin and spin because the win is between two candidates and spin can help establish the win. We think we are doing well for women, but our ranking in the world in light of female representatives is pathetic. How often do you hear that in the news?
Our system allows 30 percent of the voters to get in the driver’s seat if that 30 percent disregards all other issues.
- And that is where our system does not deliver except for those that exploit the bottom 30 percent.
Is the message clear? We are to blame for the results of this nation.
Instead of voting in a good third party and a good fourth party, we focus so much on the issues that captures the 30 percent that we forget the two dogs that ransack the butchery shop. We let these dogs take it all, including getting as little done as they can get away with. They both point at the other party for the blame. We may follow them and do the same. “No, this dog was not bad at all. It was the other dog that took most of the butcher’s shop in its mouth. That was a bad dog. That does not mean we shouldn’t get rid of dogs. We need two good dogs instead.”
Repeat in your mind tonight how you just let dogs run the country. You are to blame. You are the person that pointed at one dog being bad for sure so another dog is the preferred animal to run the country. Pick between two bad options, and the end result in not most desired.
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So, now you know why 30 percent of the voters are all gung-ho about the possibility that Roe v. Wade gets rebuked. Not only does this specific group want it, but they actually control the nation to their pleasing in this very narrow respect. The ones that are really in control of this party actually do not care about abortion at all. It’s the carrot for the donkey, or the elephant’s obsession, so the bus goes where they want it to go to (and no surprise what that direction is).
The other 70 percent of us are on the bus going to a place we don’t want to go and we can’t do much about it — we think.
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Normally, the 30 percent behaves a bit better because they don’t want to alienate the middle of society and hand the majority to the other political party next time around.
Every now and then, however, they see that the middle is asleep, a middle section of society that doesn’t care about abortion, healthcare for all, good public transportation, social equity, global climate change, decent education for all, meaningful minimum wages, a professional police force, a balanced supreme court, eliminating corruption and red tape, environmental disaster culpability, and they run with their one issue that they really really like until it is put in place.
Did you read what I just wrote or did I lull you asleep?
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None of us cried foul when we learned in school how we have separation of powers.
We do not have separation of powers. The politicians appoint the judges, and the politicians only need the right 30 percent of us voters to appoint the judges. That is not separation of powers.
We are looking the other way, isn’t that right? It is too much for us to bear. Can you believe what they are doing? They are getting away with it. And then we do nothing ourselves but point, point, and point.
Who are we and what can we do?
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The good news is that there are options to do something. Sometimes it is not that hard to be awake about the truth. All we need to do is realize that our political system is set up for political spin to ensure the win. That means there are many ‘truths’ that are actually not solid truths, but we are told by our politicians that they are.
- We do not have separation of powers.
- Checks and balances are useless when Congress can’t get anything meaningful done.
- We don’t have to change the US Constitution to change our voting system.
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Let’s focus on this one.
- The US Constitution hands powers to the Federation, the States respectively, and to the People.
- The government cannot deny or disparage our rights, unless the US Constitution allows our government to deny or disparage our rights. That’s the long and the short of it.
That means that our governments at the local levels are in question. Local governments are not mentioned in the US Constitution, so they are not given Constitutional powers of their own.
That is the place where we can demand that rather peculiar voting system that Thomas Jefferson already devised, the one that is in place in many places in the world — and we can demand that it is implemented at our local level.
- We can have the best of the best after all — at the local levels.
The local level is a good start.
Can you imagine going to the voting booth and simply picking your representative? Everyone else getting the representative they wanted, too? That is Thomas Jefferson’s ingenious mind speaking. He had it figured out already for all of us.
Once we have a taste for what a real democracy is about, we will want more.
And more is easy as well.
Our State Constitutions are not that difficult to change. It is the US Constitution that is hard to change — and we are not going to do that.
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Proportional Voting means that one specific portion of the voters is the same portion of all seats delivered to us on a city council and county board. When 40 percent of the voters like, for instance, those candidates that want better education for all and then they vote for them, then these candidates got 40 percent of the seats. That is truly how simple Proportional Voting is.
In Proportional Voting, the majority is 50 percent of the voters, or more, making the political decisions; it is not 30 percent like we have today in the USA with our winner-take-all encroachment of our freedom.
Many political science professors have looked at the Constitutional claim, and none was able to formulate legal arguments against it while a good number declared it is a correct legal path indeed.
In simple words:
- The State is behaving like a landlord coming into our homes and declaring that we cannot cook Brussels sprouts for dinner.
And that is illegal, says the US Constitution. The State is given powers to declare for itself what it can cook for dinner (how it holds it own elections), but it cannot enter cities and counties and tell them what is verboten in the local kitchens.
Next, the Bill of Rights has been read such that governments (unless given exception) must use the better system and not a discriminating system. Brussels sprouts (the better system) cannot be denied by any governmental agency at the local level.
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If you understand this very specific political battle, then come join us at the local level.
The ball is in front of an open goal. There is no keeper to prevent the ball to get kicked into the goal.
All you need to do is kick.
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Be proud of your nation. Make yourself prouder still by incorporating the better voting system in every spot it is allowed. We don’t need to change the Federal level as long as we make sure the Federal level ends up with three, four or five empowered parties. We can do that by splitting the seats according to all our wishes first at the local level and next at the State level. This will trickle up political diversity beyond good cop/bad cop.
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The easiest way to help?
Provide City+ State as a reply to this article (or provide County + State), and grassroots organization Local Revolutions will send a Constitutional invocation to your city or county. More than 100 cities and counties have received them so far, and we haven’t even begun sending out our press releases.
The more involved way?
Set up a Local Revolutions group in your city or county. The goal is simple: get our city officials to put the voting system in place that the Bill of Rights already guarantees us. Organize a local grassroots movement that educates people about our becoming a full-representative democracy at the local level, abandoning winner-take-all at the local level that benefits the majority but not the People as a whole.
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Are we the Land of the Free, Home of the Brave?
Or are we like the Russians? Whatever the top politicians say is good ends up being good for us, too?
