We the People

I usually stay away from politics in forums such as this because the people who agree with you will only agree and the people that disagree with you will only get angry and judge you forever based on one opinion you might hold. But at the moment, I'm angry and when I'm angry, I type. So here I go.

I'm really, really, really tired of politics. It's gigantic and complicated and ineffectual. The point of a democracy is that the people vote in who they want to vote in and then those people vote on issues representative of the PEOPLE'S NEEDS.

First of all, a democracy does not work if all the participants of the democracy don't know what they're freaking talking about. Myself included, we simply do not understand our government. This is partly because it's become a huge web of annoying complicatedness and partly because we don't care to understand. This results in everybody taking the word of political pundits on highly polarized networks, until nobody has any opinions at all of their own, creating little armies of Keith Olbermans or Bill O'Reilly's or (God help us) Rush Limbaughs.

We end up with people thinking the healthcare bill will result in all their grandmas dying, a billion simultaneous free abortions, and the general end of the world. This simple, ignorant misconceptions result in stalling any forward progress on the bill. Republicans just say no, no, no so they can get re-elected by their misinformed Republican constituents. They keep the bill from getting passed, so even people who support the bill end up siding with the Republicans because the Democrats can't get it through. But they can't get it through because of the Republicans! Silly politics keep going on. Meanwhile, millions of people struggle to get by day to day with no healthcare or no job. I thought the government was supposed to help and protect the people??

Even Obama said in some interview or another that his mistake was that he thought the people would understand the policy. Because the policy itself is good. But all they end up getting is gross misrepresentations of the truth that they vehemently oppose without any real understanding. Poor Obama had too much faith in the American people and is now paying for it.

It used to be the media's responsibility to explain the government to the people. But they don't. All we get is men personally attacking others without remorse, overly biased reporting. (I just got caught in a sad youtube vortex of startling examples of horrible political reporting... I highly recommend that if you take anything they say on FOX News OR MSNBC seriously.)

It's a shame. How is a democracy supposed to work when politicians only want to get re-elected, the parties only want to shoot each other down, and the people have no clue what's really going on??