"With No Malice"©2012
A General Interest Opinion Column by an opinionated person.
Vic Topmiller Jr
12/01/12
Government, part 44

WORDS
'They sing. They hurt. They teach. They sanctify. They were man's first, immeasurable feat of magic.
They liberated us from ignorance and our barbarous past.' Leo Rosten.

Is It Really About Jobs? (or the economy?)
Much Deeper Than That.

"Is the winner the winner?"
"Politics could drive us all crazy."

"For they being ignorant of God's righteousness, and going about to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted themselves to the righteousness of God." Rom. 10:3

It's near the end of campaigning, almost all of the voters will have locked in their choices either by early voting or by psychic preference and further declarations from the politicians or the media will make little difference. The rhetoric will soon drift to other subjects, the tone of urgency will subside, and we will return to some sense of normalcy. You wish.

No, the nature of politics will not change and politicians will be heaped upon with great mounds of glory or disdain as we search for someone to blame for our own shortcomings.

In a contentious political race (or would races better describe) like this one, it is hard to say that if either sides win elections that the country, state, county or city will be better served? No, my opinion is no. The entrenchment of political agenda has become too much a part of our thinking.

So let's say, in an election where the electorate is comprised of ten million voters, and one candidate gets 55% of the vote and the other gets 45% of the vote it means that clearly one candidate won over the other. That also means that 4,500,000 people have very different opinions.

In some organizations, such as church, such as a Baptist church or some evangelical organizations where their constitution provides for an absolute democracy, that is, all decisions are made based on the majority of the members' votes, if the vote in not in one hundred percent consensus, a re-vote will be taken to allow the dissenters to come in line and vote with the majority so that, as far as the record is concerned, it will go down in history as a unanimous vote.

Could that happen in a political race?? Bet not. Doesn't happen in church all that often either.

But in my own opinion, and that's the only one that counts here, the problem with the USA goes much deeper than top of the table politics. It has to do with the hearts and souls of the electorate in general. Not just the 55 or 45%. It seems to me that people are no longer endowed with personal, strong convictions about what is right and wrong. Values, a term that you may think I use too often, seem to have been relegated to a position of convenience. I.e.: if it is convenient for me to be bold and noble then I will. If not, I will slant my values to serve my purpose. Or make me feel good, or acceptable to my peers, or make me in alignment with society in general. And on and on and that's pretty much how we all are to some degree.

By being this way we subscribe to the notion that the king is always right even if the king isn't always right. In the short term it makes life easier and safer to be this way.

I love to read about the ancient Romans. They started with a somewhat legitimate effort to make Rome somewhat of a democratic republic. It worked well in the beginning. The senate, the group of elected officials representing the folks, stood by and adhered to the laws and constitution of the land. In other words, nothing came before an absolute adherence to the law, as interpreted for the benefit of the people. But soon it became more convenient and safer because of the fear of the king and the lack of fear of the people to slant the law in favor of the king and reduce the people to subordinates to the government. And then, of course, the inevitable followed, and the king became ruler over not only the people but also the agencies that were established to protect the people from the king. At that point it was all over for Rome. There was the peak, then the transition from a world power to a nothing. The fun thing about Rome is that they loved to write about how great they were so much that now the archaeologists have pieced together an almost complete record of its rise and fall.

The point is, it is not about who wins the race, it's about how strong the people are and how absolutely they require the politicians to adhere to the law. You see, if the people have strong values and insist (by recall and term limits) strong values are the rule of the land then we, as the folks, don't have anything to worry about.

And so it's the people, it's all about the people, if the country falls apart, it's all about the people.

"Do not blame Caesar, blame the people of Rome who so enthusiastically acclaimed and adored him and rejoiced in the loss of their freedom and danced in his path and gave him triumphal processions and laughed delightedly at his licentiousness and thought it very superior of him to acquire vast amounts of gold illicitly. Blame the people who hail him when he speaks in the Forum of the "new and wonderful good society which will now be Rome's" interpreted to mean "more money, more ease, more security, more living fatly at the expense of the industrious."
Marcus Cicero, Roman Statesman, 106 – 43 B.C.

It's all about "We The People."

That's My Opinion.

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