Political Agreement

Who is leading who? Congress is supposed to be the people’s voice in aggregate. Yet political discourse is readily played by elected officials at every level of government. Certainly, Congresspeople and Senators at the federal level do this. The question then becomes, who is leading whom? 

To represent the people, elected officials must do the homework and understand the issues. They are in a position with resources available to do that homework. They may learn that some issues are different in the details than on the surface. We the People most often deal with surface issues, not the substance of why the surface appears to be so.

I expect my congressman to understand the issues well enough to guide legislation and policy to achieve the objectives of the People’s Work. Today, that does not seem to be how the mechanism of government works.

When I served on a local city council, aldermen dove deep to understand the cause of problems. We chose to fix the cause of a problem rather than address the surface symptoms. We often ‘lost’ the public in those moments. The public simply didn’t understand why we did what we did, yet we were following solid processes to properly address problems. When we had the time to explain it, the public got it. Most of the time. And we had superb staff with professional depth to help us.

In an era of fast-paced news media and propaganda, however, time is not available to get beyond the sound bite. And that explains much of why America is caught in a bad place today. The public and government entities seem to be working at cross purposes.

I firmly believe that it is the public that needs to catch up with the complexities of life. Elected officials, the good ones, have to have the trust of the electorate to do the right job. If the public is ill informed, or misdirected by propaganda, then the elected officials have an impossible task.

This sad state of affairs led to the January 6th, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol. I think the rioters thought they were doing the right thing although they were not. The sadness then extends to the elected officials who supported those rioters in the false belief that they were protecting the people’s right to show their displeasure.

At some point our government must be well enough regulated to get beyond these temporary misunderstandings. In an age of deliberate misdirection, however, such commonsense does not work.

So, how do we regain our social and political equilibrium to govern effectively and timely? The People are many and their voices are indistinct because of the uproar. Cooler heads must prevail. That is the role of the elected. They must lead. They must research. They must get to the bottom of issues and forge ahead for the common good of the people.

It would help if we worked toward agreement on what we stand for. Certainly, we do not have an educated populace today. Educational process and resources are thus needed. We question whether justice is alive and well in the land? We know it is not. Too many people are dying of senseless violence. Why? What is the cause? What do we do about that cause? We simply cannot jail everyone. That does no good. Fix the broken justice system. Fix the broken promises of a thriving and dynamic economy and capitalist system. Be the just society we say we are. Be the welcoming nation of immigrants to our land we say we are. We the well-educated we claim to be. Be the who and what we ache to be.

That is the positive end we need to define. Alone that will not do the trick to fix today’s governing nightmare. But it is a very good start. It would help if journalists did their job to help the public understand the issues.

February 14, 2022

 

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