Democracy in Action

All of my life I have heard about the glories of democracy and how this country is so great because we are a democracy, as we go around the world trying to force the glories of democracy on other countries, whether they want it or not, because democracy is so wonderful.

But it is more and more clear that we do NOT live in a democracy...probably not for a long time, but definitely lately.  

Our voting system is totally wacky.  The people do not elect a president, but a select group of a small number of selected representatives elect the president and even if the other candidate has received a significant majority of the actual votes, she doesn't win the election  How is that democracy, defined as "government by the people; a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system."

If an ethnic group is going to vote in large numbers for your opposing candidate, make it more difficult for them to get to the polls or qualify to vote.  How is that democracy...making it difficult for voters to vote?  How is that "a free electoral system"?

If the voting groups don't favor your candidate, there is always the Gerrymander, drawing the lines so that the majority of districts do favor your candidate.

And when your elected representatives get to Washington, they aren't there to do the will of the people, they are there to get re-elected.  If the majority of the voters express opposition to your opponent for the Supreme court, change the rules so that the negative votes don't count.  If the president you don't like nominates a worthy candidate for Supreme court. refuse to even talk with him on the flimsy excuse that he "only" has a year left in office, so should not get to name a new justice (historical precedent notwithstanding!)

I am so tired of the people making their feelings known and our "representatives" ignoring them and doing whatever they damn well please.

I am also tired of so many people with very shady pasts, people who have almost certainly committed crimes and get a free ride when Hillary Clinton went through a monumental witch hunt, which cost the American voters millions of dollars and turned up nothing, time and time again.

We call this a democracy.  I don't know what it is, but it is not a democracy!

 

You can't tell me that the majority of people want to return to this:

or to watch children getting sick from the use of DDT, which, has been used only in limited instances (killing fleas responsible for bubonic plague, for example) since the 1970s.  The ban on DDT has been credited with the return of the bald eagle, our national bird.  But now?  Go ahead.  Use all you want!

The Daily Mail in the UK reported that more than HALF of US rivers are too polluted to support life as a result of agricultural fertilizers.  I don't know the date of this article, but it mentions that the Obama administration finalized regulations to control mercury pollution in 2011.

Now?  Gone.  Dump all the junk you want to into the nation's waterways.  Remember Flint, Michigan?  Brown unusable water coming from  the taps?  Kids getting sick?  You can't tell me that this is what the majority of Americans want.

Anybody feel all cozy knowing that it is now legal to kill mama and baby bears as they hibernate in their dens?

These things (and too many more) are now legal in our "democracy" and you can't tell me this is the will of the people.

But where are the Republican with balls who will stand up to the tyrant who is systematically getting rid of every environmental regulation that Obama put into place, which has made our world so much cleaner and less dangerous.  Other than John McCain, is there not one senator who will say ENOUGH???

We are supposed to go into war only with approval of the congress, but Trump just sent troops into Syria without a public vote and without letting the public know he was doing it.

I just don't believe this is what the idea of a "democracy" is like.  Nothing is perfect, but this is so bad, bad, bad, and we, the common people trying to raise our families, feel so terribly powerless as we watch the country that we love slip away and as we become the laughing stock of the world.  (Just spend time with someone from another country to learn how people around the world feel about this country now.)