I thought this was a very honest story — until I saw your name underneath it. Umair, you really have such a thick agenda, I could use it to burn the house down. But I won’t.
Can you please become a writer writing from the perspective of honesty? I know you see the parts in our own society that are not honest, and we can use a lot more honesty for sure. But adding more spin isn’t going to unwind a spinning society.
Naturally, one cannot spin unless there is a good amount of truth involved. But the subject matter of your story is not Covid-19, but how bad the US is.
You are the Trump of writers.
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Yes, the situation is bad. Yes, we should have worked together more as a team. Yes, we could have prevented many deaths, but no, not without adding even more people to the unemployment stats.
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You don’t talk about what needs to be done.
I am glad you mentioned New Zealand, because they used to have a two-party system like we have. In 1996, they changed their system to incorporate proportionality, something we can do today at the local level of cities and counties.
With the very first new election, an astonishing 47 percent more women were elected than during the old system. Today, New Zealand has 40 percent females among their representatives. A very clear indication that their old system (our current system) discriminates systematically. The US has about half that percentage today.
Our system is from the 18th century.
This is us, to the left. We are segregated in districts where we have to battle each other for that single seat. This is pure divide-and-conquer. It is dog-eat-dog.
Voting minorities of as large as 49.9 percent of the voters remain unrepresented; they don’t sit at the tables of decision making, not speaking their truths. Fifty percent plus one vote can dictate the outcome to the unrepresented voting minorities. It doesn’t matter if the voting minority is African American, young adults, women, homosexuals, or poor whites; when not in the majority, no seat is obtained. All these large voting minorities are not represented to the level of their numbers.
To the right in the image above one can see the actual We The People system. As shown in this example of a city council with eight seats, almost 90 percent of the voters are guaranteed that their vote translates into a representative they handpicked themselves. All substantial voting minorities are represented in this better system. That system is not dog-eat-dog.
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When San Francisco moved from At-Large to district voting, the ugly voting system became quite obvious. Prior, in the semi-proportional system also known as city-wide, they had 6 men and 5 women in the eleven supervisor seats. After the change to district voting, the city had 10 men and 1 woman in these eleven seats (interesting twist: a black woman).
The Democratic Party did their best to fix it up over the years. Wonderful as the board may appear today, the Democratic Machine tried to quickly mask the divide-and-conquer system we have with applying a nice pancake layer of We The People makeup.
It should not be a surprise that the system was changed to the more restricted version. Back then, the Green Party had become a popular party in the Bay Area, getting some of the seats in the region. Today, they are gone. By moving back to district voting, the Democrats made sure that third parties wouldn’t get their seats. Today, all SF supervisors are registered Democrats.
Long live the dog-eat-dog system.
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Let’s not uncover and discard the good parts of our society; let’s fix the ground rules that aggravate racism and ingrain discrimination of all kinds and does not help us during pandemics (or with healthcare, or with prison population, or with student debts, or with public transportation).
The good news is that the US Constitution is already demanding the We The People system for cities and counties. Here is a visual.
A: Federal and State governments are given powers and freedoms.
B: The 14th Amendment demands the better system put in place.
As shown to the left, Federal and State governments received #A from the US Constitution and they can use #A to create themselves some leeway with #B.
Cities and counties are not even mentioned in the US Constitution, and so they must fully abide by the highest document of the nation.
States did not receive the power to hand over power to third parties within that then extends their right to ignore #B to the same level as the State.
Cities and counties must follow #B strictly as declared in the US Constitution. But as you can see in the same visual to the right, they assumed those powers that they do not have. They perpetuate the divide-and-conquer system to a level that is not allowed. They should have the We The People system in place, per the highest document in the nation.
In a society where all get to handpick their own representatives people feel valued. They will feel that they are part of a larger whole. This is something that is also described with the word emancipation. Being valued like all others in the outcome promotes the emancipation of all people as equal participants in a society.
Read well: equal in the outcome, and not just equal in the process as we have today in the voting booth. The churning we have inside our system pulverizes the individual vote, and only the collective voice remains standing.
What we have is not emancipation.
All we need to do is hold the feet of our local representatives to the fire and demand our Constitution-given better system today.
