Is Our Democracy dysfunctional.

 That was the question in a Washington Post editorial over a week ago.  Below is the letter I submitted to it...but they didn't bite.  Now I'm glad.  Today they printed my letter submitted early last week - regarding our interdependent world.  I'll post it soon. 

Dear Editor,

Our broken democracy isn’t new.  US national security experts recognized it as “dysfunctional” in a survey before Trump’s election.  The procurement of new weapons systems alone couldn’t keep up with the rapid advances in modern technologies, new threats, and the glacial pace of government action or change.  Our government was engineered this way centuries ago.  Given today’s political polarization and two-party system they had warned about then, today our Constitution appears unamendable.  But it's needed!  Thomas Jefferson wrote “every constitution” should be ‘rewritten every 19 years’. Because “the earth belongs to the living and not to the dead.”

If by miracle a Constitutional convention was created its new architecture would need to be based on the “self-evident’ “truths” expressed in our Declaration of Independence.  Truths that are founded on “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” - not the personal religious, political, or economic truths we make up in our minds.   Abraham Lincoln called the Declaration our “Apple of Gold” and the Constitution is ‘Frame of Silver.   Why swear an oath to protect an old and flawed frame?

We must accept our reality expressed by Jen Easterly, director of CISA, [Cyber and Infrastructure Security Agency] our nation’s newest federal agency created in 2018 by the Trump administration.  “Everything is connected, everything is interdependent, so everything is vulnerable.... And that’s why this has to be a more than whole of government, a more than whole of nation [effort]. It really has to be a global effort....”

Multiple unsustainable trends exist in our nation. Many are linked to global pressures and thus immune to the reactionary nature of both “we the people’ and those we elect to make laws.  The concept of prevention by addressing root causes appears to be unamerican.  Minor investments to remedy root causes would disarm our debt bomb. 

What is so complicated about taking care of nature and following the Golden Rule.   Rocket science for national security and leaving this troubled planet is useful, but what is needed to make heaven on earth is not complicated or expensive.  It just won’t win elections. 

In a 1798 address to our military John Adams said “Our Constitution was made only for a religious and moral people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other." 

"We have it in our power to begin the world over again."  - Thomas Paine