If this is the American Spring, then let’s be smarter than the people in the Arab Spring. Changing power requires a smart approach; power can get changed only by changing the game of power. Nothing else matters. Small successes aren’t successes.
We owe it to ourselves that we do not make the mistakes others made before us. Trying to change how power functions, many do not succeed. Too often, they create a snake that bites its own tail.
If it is equality we want, then we need to focus on our overall system that does not deliver equality.
If we focus on creating a neighborhood based on equality, we will not succeed when the city remains based on inequality.
Our system is divide-and-conquer and if we don’t change it, the next injustice and the subsequent riot are automatically included.
With voting, our system is most obvious: We are segregated in voting districts and we fight each other over that one seat.
This is us, to the left. Segregated to the (power) bone.
Voting minorities of as large as 49.9 percent of the voters remain unrepresented; they don’t sit at the tables of decision making. Fifty percent plus one vote can dictate the outcome to unrepresented voting minorities. It doesn’t matter if the voting minority is African American, young adults, women, homosexuals, the poor, socialists; when not in the majority, no seat is obtained. These large voting minorities are not represented to the level of their numbers.
To the right 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 system.
We believe we live in a nation with a We The People system, and we sometimes do get legislation that is We The People in nature. But when push comes to shove, divide-and-conquer always wins the day in our nation.
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One in eight Americans is African American. Three out of 100 senators are African American and that is an all time high. Women are more than 50 percent of the population, not even half that number is found in our seats of power.
In 1996, New Zealand changed its two-party system to incorporate proportional voting. The number of female representatives jumped by 47 percent in the first next new election. This shows real well how bad divide-and-conquer really is. Today, four out of ten seats are occupied by women in New Zealand.
San Francisco saw the opposite happening when they moved from At-Large (a semi-proportional system) to district voting. Prior, they had 6 men and 5 women in the eleven supervisor seats, but after the change they got 10 men and 1 woman in these eleven seats.
The Democratic Party did their best to fix it up over the years. They tried to quickly mask the divide-and-conquer system we have with a nice layer of We The People brought to you by the Democratic Party.
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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 unfortunately they can use this to create themselves some leeway with #B.
Cities and counties are not even mentioned in the US Constitution, and yet 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.
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 assume to have 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.
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We can change our bad system today, at the local level.
We can hold the feet of our local representatives to the fire and demand our Constitution-given better system — today. It’s the law of the land.
Divide-and-conquer is mean, and we should remove it where we can. We can, today, in our cities and counties, with the US Constitution in hand.
Let’s do better than the people involved in the Arab Spring. Had Egypt picked a smarter form of democracy instead of the hardest, Egypt could have very well been a stable democracy today. They probably didn’t realize they had picked the South-American model, a really difficult system.
Let’s not make their mistakes. Let’s implement equality at the safest place possible, the local level, and work our way up from there.
“The oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors.” — Paulo Freire.
We have to be smart to overcome divide-and-conquer and not create a snake that bites its own tail.
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