I know – you’re rolling your eyes already. You’re thinking ‘cheaters get away with it all the time’ or, if your Christian, ‘well, I know they face judgment someday…’ – but you’re adults and that’s just an old adage we tell kids so they have some chance of growing up something like well adjusted.
Only the phrase isn’t ‘cheaters never get caught’ – they do. Otherwise how would we know that they ‘got away with it’?
The phrase is cheaters never prosper. Think about it – once you know a certain person or business has cheated you do you ever trust them with your money or your business again? A few of us will grant a second chance – but most of us don’t even do that much. And no, there’s nothing unchristian in that – forgiveness isn’t reconciliation. Yep, we’re really supposed to forgive 70 x 7 times – and no, that’s not meant to mean we don’t have to forgive on the 491st offense. But there’s nothing in the rule book that says Charlie Brown has to keep trying to kick that football, either. His job is to forgive – but Lucy has to step up in order to reconcile – or more to the point, buy Charlie a football tee in a genuine effort to make amends.
So when your ‘best friend’ suckers you into an ‘investment’ scheme or when a business deliberately deceives you into paying for a service or good you never receive do you ‘invest’ more money with your ‘friend’ or buy another ‘car repair’ that you didn’t even know you needed? Of course not – you cut your losses and go elsewhere.
This is why business scams tend to be short lived – in a city, maybe a few years at most – because word gets out that ‘Bob’s Used Flying Saucers’ sells duds that don’t fly and they don’t give refunds. A business spends a lot of time and effort gaining public trust – it’s why Amazon would rather eat the loss on an illegitimate return than risk treating a customer unfairly. Reputation has value.
A cheater’s reputation is quickly a negative – and they find that they have to move on to find new suckers or start the long, painful process of rebuilding trust. The thing about greener pastures is that winter eventually comes. Moving on just restarts a destructive cycle unless and until the cheater decides to stop cheating.
So, what’s so different about politics? You’re all thinking ‘yeah, but politicians..’ And there’s some truth to that – politicians benefit from a system that they are supposed to make the rules for – Mr. Fox, would you be so kind as to guard our henhouse? A few do manage to stay in power – most don’t. Most harvest lucrative jobs in the very industries they were supposedly helping to regulate – most especially at the Federal level. But the reality is that corruption is an endemic problem throughout every level of government.
It’s not so much that politicians get away with it – Congress has an approval rating that’s been hovering below 20% for decades. Public trust in politicians is abysmally low. The better question is why do we keep voting for these guys?
The answer is two pronged – at least two major prongs. First, at the Federal and many state levels, reelection means a gain in seniority. Seniority means a gain in power. And that power means your more senior congressman can send home more Federal tax dollars to pay for goodies like social programs, infrastructure and things that look good with the congressman’s name on them like libraries.
Basically, the voter gets a kickback in terms of Federal outlay every time they vote the Honorable Honest Harry back into office. Harry just has to make sure something gets built or some wacky social program gets funded – no need to deal with the real and difficult issues. Nice job, huh?
The second is that even when Harry finally does retire – or gets ousted because he got caught doing something that really ticked off his constituents – we the voters are really lazy about the first part of this process – choosing good candidates. Primaries matter – and so does knowing who you are voting for and why.
We’ve all done the ‘like that name, check all the first boxes, just guess’ voting thing. Most of the time we haven’t a clue what the constable’s office even is, let alone who to vote for. That’s bad enough in the general election when we’re voting for the letter and hoping for the best – but it’s destructive in the primary where we are supposedly choosing the best!
The reality is very few crooked politicians go through entire careers unscathed. Most DO get caught – they aren’t nearly as smart as people think they are – and no where near as smart as they think they are! There is a reason people have such a low trust in politicians – and why the majority of political careers are short. Most DON’T get away with it. But what do we do about the those who do?
Well, first, we start small – because it’s smarter to climb a few steps and then move on than to try to run up the side of a mountain at full speed. If you really care about this country, what governments (all of them) do and the people governments affect – which is everyone, rich or poor, – then you do your homework. Don’t try to cram all the information on a ballot into your skull just before the primary – you’ll go nuts. Instead, once a week, work on learning who your representatives are – one at a time – and what job they do.
Not just the easy ones – don’t call it a day after you get all three of the Federal representatives (House, Senate and President) – but find out who is on the school board that represents you – whether or not you have kids. What is the constable, anyway and who holds that office? Just find out about one office and office holder each week until you have them all.
Your first reaction will probably be ‘egad, how many of these things are there? They’re like rabbits!’ Yep, and you have your own little warren you never knew about. But on the bright side, they rarely multiply so once you have them all down, you don’t have to worry about new electoral offices popping up out of nowhere.
The next step is to become familiar with the candidates – and this is can be done largely from your Laz-y-boy. Follow your local party – see what they’re doing online. Find out what’s going on – when elections are and who all is running. Elections don’t pop up unexpectedly – the next primary for most of us is in 2022 – so just do it a little at a time. Ten to fifteen minutes a WEEK is all it should take – none of this is hard. And it’s just like chopping down a tree – one swing at at time and no one says you have to do them all on the same day!
Of course there’s more – but we’ll cover more stuff as we go along. Whatever political disaster that got you to read all of this is not going to take down the whole country – not yet. And the things we need to do to take back our government so that it serves us and doesn’t do so much crazy stuff take time and effort to do. That’s how the Constitution was designed – slow and steady rather than fast and over the cliff.
Cheaters never prosper – unless we let them. The only thing stopping We the People is us. We can – we must – take control of our government. Every person counts – every vote counts – every voice counts – unless they chose not to be counted.
Be counted.
