Monday, June 8, 2015

Pluto and the Crats


We call ourselves a democracy, but do we know what that is? Democracy is a form of government that is run directly by the people. This means the people gather and vote on issues, plans, etcetera. A teacher I had in college said this was impossible and unwieldy in populations over 2500; from my experience in Little League, I doubt if it is possible in populations over 25. We do not have a theocracy in America, wherein the Church runs the State. We do not have an autocracy, either, where one person, be he or she King, Queen or Dictator, runs the show. But we do not have a democracy in the US, either. At best we have something called Representative Democracy, where the people invest their power by proxy – or avatar, if you like – by selecting individuals to represent them and their interests. The idea of our state and federal governments is to provide representation in a smaller group so things might actually get done without waiting for general elections and national debates. But what we have is only partially that. With fifty states and one national government, we are really a Republic, in which those elected representatives have the power to govern. The hope is that the chosen representatives honestly and fully embody the wishes of their constituents, those who elected them, but the reality is that the selection process that brings candidates to us for choice runs on money and lots of it. Therefore, the rich have a chance to garner undue influence on those who decide to run, and many of those who run are rich in the first place. The common man and woman, the true democrat, only gets to choose from what has already been chosen. Ultimately, this all means that the rich are the ones who actually run the country, and that is called a Plutocracy. Pluto is no longer a planet, but Plutocrats abound on this one. And what plutocrats love best is for the rest of us to be silent. Silence is always taken as assent even when intended to express the opposite.

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