What Do You Want… From Your Government?

When you boil it all down, it really comes down to being based on the definition of one word.

Representative

We call them Congressmen, Members of Congress (MoC), Senators, or any of a wide variety of pejoratives, but when it comes down to it, there’s only one thing we want them to be. Our representative.

We live in a representative democracy. Some still think its inconceivable to collect votes digitally from 340,000,000 citizens (minus minors) though that is likely doable. Instead, we elect representatives to represent us, and all those representatives gather in federal, state, and local forums to vote for things on our behalf. Or at least that’s how its supposed to work.

Facing the Reality

Every day we witness the reality of our representative democracy. Although a majority of us voted for each of them and elected them to represent us, it seems that somewhere along the path from our district to the Congress they forgot all about that. They may represent their own priorities, especially getting re-elected next time, or they may represent the interests of those investors who contributed to their campaigns. Or they may even represent the interests of others outside our country, including our adversaries.

But they don’t represent us. Not even the majority of us who voted for them. That means that our representatives are failing to perform their primary function.

Witness the Evidence

Over the past several weeks we’ve had the awful opportunity to see the most vivid evidence of their failure ever displayed. There are several hundred representatives who refuse to meet with their constituents, the people who voted for them. Their neighbors. Those few brave souls who have held town halls have found themselves screamed at, booed, and even threatened with bodily harm. And despite this clear statement of their constituents’ displeasure at their actions, they refuse to change. They fear that representing their constituents faithfully will cause their awful leader to “primary” them which will cause them to lose their seat in Congress at the next election. That is more unacceptable to them than misrepresenting us. They’d rather see all of us suffer rather than suffer themselves.

They are cowards and frauds. Frauds because they assured us, during the election campaigns, that they would represent us faithfully, and better than their opposition would. That simply turned out to not be true.

So, What DO We Want from Them?

This answer is startlingly simple. We want them to do the job we elected them to do. We want them to represent our interests and our attitudes.

We’d be reasonable! We’d recognize that we don’t all always agree on what we want, but we accept that the majority should prevail. Even if its not what you wanted to happen, the idea that the majority of your neighbors got what they wanted would be acceptable to every one of us.

Of course, to represent us accurately they’d need to make sure they know what we want. They’d need to consult with us regularly. This might take the form of regular town hall meetings, or even some sort of polling. We’re constantly told to write to our MoC, our congresspeople, our senators, and to call them. Does anyone feel confident that their email, their letter, or their voicemail message ever actually gets to the politician themselves? Do we even think someone is analyzing them?

Do we sometimes feel like we’re wasting our time? But then, what else do we have??

We end up wanting them to do nothing more than the job we elected them for, to represent us faithfully. But we feel more and more like we have no effective way to tell them what we want. Even though we keep asking how they could do what they’re doing, we find ourselves helpless to effect change.

How Did This Happen?

In the end result we will come to realize that our Constitution was written during a very different age, and we simply haven’t kept up our responsibility to keep updating it to address the realities of the time in which we’re living. Back then, nobody anticipated just how awful a candidate could get themselves elected to high office and what that could result in.

Upside Down

And now we’re upside down. The minority has taken several decades to carefully plan who they’d need to corrupt and what subterfuge they’d need to enact in order to get to a place where they, the minority, rule over the majority. According to the Founding Fathers, that was never the way it was intended to be, but these minority minions are clever devils.

Now we’re confronted with the challenge of putting ourselves right side up.

There is a way to achieve this within the confines of the law of our land. This will require more of us finding our way to our representatives and convincing them to accurately represent us rather than their fearful leader, who was never supposed to be their leader at all. Given the difficulty we’ve all encountered in trying to do that, it looks like we all need to up our game and learn how to effectively torment them until they relent and do their jobs properly.

If we can’t wait until the next election, we may be able to convince some of the current majority leaders to abandon their abjectly subservient party and join the actual majority that is somehow the current minority. This would insulate them from being “primaried.”

Or we may be able to convince some of them that we will support them if they support us. Given how many of them are weak-minded “local yokels” this may be far more difficult in some districts than others, but we really only need to convert a handful of them.

Choose Your Cause

It would be insanely difficult to support every wrong we’ve been burdened with. Each of us should carefully consider what we really want to see change and campaign specifically for that. Let your personal priorities rule. But by all means do what you can. A participatory representative democracy like ours requires participation from each of us.

Net net, what we all want and need is real representation. Reliable representation and the respect that comes with it.