President's Day reflects what "we the people" have done with the power we have.

“If you're not making someone else's life better, then you're wasting your time. Your life will become better by making other lives better.”  ― Will Smith

Last year the US Surgeon General said the greatest public health problem in America is loneliness.   The suicide, obesity, opioid, and mass shooter statistics may be reliable indicators.   It says mountains about our individualistic culture that anyone in our nation could feel lonely.  It doesn’t have to be that way.

We all want our lives to matter.  Many people need help.  But our individualistic culture leads more people to be devoted to comfort, feeling good, and looking good – rather than doing good or being good.

The burdensome news is that everything we do (and don’t do) does makes a difference.  Sometimes the differences are good.  Sometimes not so good.  And other times, downright harmful.  Most of the time we get very little feedback as to either kind of difference we make.  But most of us honestly want to make a positive difference in other people’s lives.  And if someone don’t want to, it’s a warning sign that something is off balance in their life.  And that imbalance likely has an overall negative effect on others around them. 

  

It’s not always easy to see how our lives matter.   If they matter for good or for worse, but there are some fundamental self-evident truths (as well as miss conceptions) that if we know them, it would enable us to make bigger differences with lesser amounts of efforts.

You’ve probably heard that it takes fewer face muscles and less energy to smile, than frown.  And if someone has ever sincerely smiled at you, you know how it makes you feel.  Better than if they were frowning.

But this blog is NOT about feeling good.  It’s about politics.  And if you believe you are not involved in politics you are delusional.  Your decision to remove yourself from politics is actually an affirmative vote for the status quo.  And if you haven’t noticed, the status quo is unsustainable in multiple ways. And almost each failure will affect you and nearly every aspect of life for those you love.   

The problem is, we tend to believe everything we think.  It’s killing us.  Literally.   What follows is about saving us and the world we depend on for all of our basic needs and comforts.  It’s about making the biggest difference you can in this democratic republic, without voting, donating money to a campaign, or getting dozens of others to vote.  In a nutshell, the greatest difference you can make is building a working relationship with your elected U.S. Representative and/or Senators, regardless of their political party, by using loving persistence, reliable information, and the partnership of as many friends, neighbors, coworkers, or family members you can muster, who live in your same Congressional District.  

Doing the math confirms a gut level feeling you may have had the impotence of your one vote every two years.  Standing in a voting booth and casting a ballet, full well knowing it won’t make any difference in getting my favorite candidate into office, still brings tears to my eyes and a sense of pride in my chest like hearing someone playing bagpipes.  Neither can I fully explain.  But I can explain why voting doesn’t make a whit of difference in making human life on this troubled planet any better.  Even if it makes us feel good and gives us legitimate rights to complain about the dysfunctional political system that is failing us, our environment and our children’s future.

The math:  There are approximately 700,000 voters in each Congressional District.  It does double the weight to your one vote when roughly 350,000 eligible voters won’t even show up to cast a ballot.  But the chance of your one vote making a difference in winning an election isn’t as good as you being struck by lightning.  Unlike lighting, voting only happens every two years.   You can up your election time impact by getting others to vote or raising money to fund outreach campaigns but even if you get your ‘guy/gal’ elected there is no guarantee they will do as you hope once they are in office. 

Fortunately, they will be in office for approximately 600 working days in which they will be in their actual office working about 3 days a week (135/year) or 270 days before the next election.  According to our Constitution’s First Amendment, we have the inalienable right to ‘petition’ our representatives every day of the year.   To be effective you don’t want to be a pest, but it IS their job to represent you and others in your Congressional District with every vote they take. 

Most Americans make the mistake of thinking that once elected members are in office they will faithfully look out for the self-interests of ‘we the people.  Fact is, the squeaky wheel gets the grease.  And those doing the most squeaking are the NRA, the tobacco lobby, the real-estate industry, the banking industry, weapons makers, Wall Street, and AIPAC (just to name a few).   There is no equivalent well organized and well-funded lobby for renter’s, students, endangered species, or clean air.   Amazingly, there has been miracle successes by small groups of citizens who are well informed, disciplined, lovingly persistent, and resilient – who have organized and won legislative battles that has saved tens of thousands if not millions of lives.  MADD, Nader’s Raders, RESULTS…

Unfortunately, many of these groups, as good as they are at striking at the branches of injustice, rarely focus on striking at the roots of the injustices.   That would require systemic or structural changes in the government policy/law making establishment.  And the value system of most Americans.  Not an easy task.  Especially when nearly half of the voting population is disillusioned with voting, unhappy or discussed and disheartened with politics (as if it were a incurable disease).  Its not.  We have a government, of, for, and by “We the people” and we have the power to change it if so desired.  

And that bring us to some profound barriers to having the government we want that invests in human and sustainable environmental capital to prevent problems…instead of a budget busting reactionary Congress that traditionally relies on a tragedy or sheer embarrassment, before taking preventive action.  

And here’s the very bad and catastrophically harmful reality.  There are at least two structural flaws in our political system that prevent it from working quickly and effectively on some of the most powerful forces now impacting every aspect of our lives.   First, our government system was originally designed not to work quickly.  But the exponential advances in increasingly powerful technology that is globally available and affordable is changing things at hyper speed.  Meanwhile a basically ignorant and easily distracted public, relies on a divided, virtually dysfunctional government to change things, if it is not virtually shut down by an executive order. 

Second, and here is the real challenge.  Our government system is based on a myth and increasingly refuses to change it regardless of how many indicators and experts recommend sweeping transformation change.  Listen to any C-span hearing on important and urgent issues that appear intransigent, and you will hear the words “comprehensive”, “holistic”, “whole of government approach” by experts offering solutions.  The one other word they will offer is our need but build (invest in) “resilience” … knowing the changes they are calling for will NOT be done.  

The myth is that our government can remain ‘independent’ of other governments and use ‘independent’ agencies within our own government, to effectively address globally interdependent problems and existential global threats.  Independence is a purely mental human construct that exists nowhere in the known universe.  Believing and codifying it into law, forces us into a dilemma of losing our freedom, our security, or both.

Civilization as we know it now depends on no nuclear war, no bioweapons attacks, no EMP events, no pandemic, no international economic collapse, and no environmental changes that over heats our planet, destroys our capacity grow food, or ends the effectiveness of our antibiotic arsenal.  Each of which requires nearly unprecedented global cooperation and preventive measures.

 I use the word “nearly” because there was two times when the world did come together as one.   The first was the eradication of smallpox.  A virus that killed more humans over 70 years of the last century than all the wars and genocides combined over the 100 years of that same century.  It required every nation, county, village and family to participate in the global vaccination campaign and succeeded in just ten years.  It cost American tax payers only $30 million a year for that global campaign.  Shockingly, that one time investment has since saved US taxpayers over $30 Billion (a thousand to one repayment) in expenses that were no longer required to vaccinate and treat US children against that one disease.

The second time was the elimination of fluorocarbons to protect our world’s natural ozone shield against the deadly UV rays that would kill all life on the surface of the earth.

We are unlikely to change our national or international governance systems any time soon.  But we can make other vital life saving and dollar saving investments in prevention of other infectious diseases, hunger, illiteracy, pollution, and violence that each ends up costing us more at our border or in our Congressional Districts than we know or ever tally.    There are 17 globally agreed upon goals intended to address the root causes of so many global threats that we see (or feel) today knocking on our borders, our sense of security, and our cherished freedoms.  These “17 Sustainable Development Goals” will cost trillions of dollars that our governments cannot afford.  The profound news is that ‘we the people’ have the capacity to generate sufficient political will to fund them without raising taxes.  We would need to convince our US Representatives to pass a bill that could freeze and seize some of the $32 trillion that is stashed in offshore accounts, some US banks, and very expensive real-estate here in our own cities.  Much of this bounty is illicit money hidden in these places by kleptocrats, criminal cartels, wealthy capitalists avoiding taxes, and terrorists. 

It’s a dirty job, but it can be done.  But it will require citizens of this great nation, giving up on a few myths. 

1.  That our vote makes enough of a difference.

2. That you can’t make a difference with your elected officials.

3. Military power and walls will protect us, our health, democracy, and prosperity -- from pandemics, WMD proliferation, climate change, the evolution of weaponry, and global corruption.

Love is certainly a profoundly powerful force. But the force of law is needed too. 

“Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.” ― Martin Luther King Jr.

‘We the people’ have the power in our citizenship to make just laws happen, if that is our priority.  And, if we love our families, our nation, our freedoms and our children’s future as much as we say we do, we will come together and use our political power to make the biggest difference we can by being a truly united states and using our greatest powers to form a more perfect union. 

It’s that…or more of the same.   And that, will NOT end well.  Everything we do and don’t do makes a difference.  What are we going to do?