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We Are the Greatest People on Earth

We are the greatest people on Earth. Without us, the world's so-called Great Powers would've been covered up by fascists dedicated to the evil of ethnic cleansing in the middle of the last century. We have been at the forefront of every major technological innovation of the last century. We were the first country to master the atom and the computer, and we were the first country to put a man on the moon.

Our armed forces are the most powerful and most highly skilled military force that the world has ever seen, but we do not use them to lord over our neighbors. We remain committed to using them as a force for good. We remain the only country on the planet where a man can speak what is on his mind without being attacked by the government, however unpopular his message.

We are tolerant and religious. We are strong and devoted to peace. Here the majority makes rules, and we still protect minority rights. Even to this very day, we are optimistic. We are committed to the prospects that tomorrow will be better than today, that our children will have it better than their parents and that any American child can achieve greatness if she works hard enough for it.

It's Not Our Fault

For the first time in my life, I hear our optimism faltering. Our faith in the future is being shaken. I can't remember the last time that I went an entire week without hearing from at least one friend that she lost her job, that he needed a doctor but couldn't afford one or that her hours had been cut back at work and she didn't know if she could pay for next month's childcare. What happened? We're hurting, and I find myself asking the same question as everyone else: "why?"

We elected public servants to do what they thought was best for the country and for their districts. And for many glorious years, that is what our elected officials were for the most part: servants. They were less than perfect at times, but they honestly worked together to make things better. Their views were shaped by their values; and their values were often the same as ours. They never forgot that we paid their salaries, that we were their bosses. For the first couple of centuries in this country, most of the people tasked with deciding when and where to use our armed services had served in the military. The people who represented us came from a mixture of economic backgrounds and traditions, just like we do.

The amount of money 'required' to run for elected office kept increasing. The percentage of men and women who held office and who had also served their country in uniform decreased. The number of people in Congress who grew up in poverty or in the middle class diminished. The people who ran for office increasingly came from a new permanent class of politicians, usually people born with silver spoons in their mouths. Regular citizens were discouraged from running. Many of us gave up on voting because we felt that our votes didn't matter in a system where money determines the outcome.

Even when an occasional candidate emerged from the middle class, the party leaders who "handled" the candidate and "shaped" her message came from the permanent politician class. Policy was dictated by donors and lobbyists. Even when members of Congress lost their jobs, they could count on getting new jobs with the very lobbyists who had been their contributors, and ousted office-holders remained the leaders of major party politics, behind the scenes. The major parties see victory over one another as an end in itself. Our servants became our masters.

True, we voted for many of the men and women who took part in this process, but we weren't given any real options; we haven't been given any real options for years. A day or two spent among actual politicians is enough to discourage most of us from running. Many of the people who determine who runs for office in this country: donors, lobbyists, professional campaign managers have been elected by no one. We don't even know their names. They're the people who scores of future politicians who call themselves "politicos" watch and idolize, whose stats they memorize. They watch campaigns and races and the people who plan and run them like the rest of us watch football games and idolize professional football players. You see, to these guys, running for office has become a game.

We're in a serious crisis. We're hurting in a way that the people who are supposed to represent us cannot understand, and they don't seem to be doing anything about it; many of them don't even seem to be trying to do anything about it. Why would they? They're not hurting! They live and work in a world that only exists inside the beltway of Washington, D.C. They exist in the part of the economy that's "recession proof." When I ask myself why they aren't doing more to help, I find myself returning again and again to the thought that most of the people we've sent to Washington aren't like us.

We Can Fix This

We don't have to put up with this. They can tell me that the greatest people on Earth can't take our country back between now and November 2012, but I wouldn't listen. They can tell me that it's harder to defeat an incumbent who has spent ten years as a member of the U.S. House than it is to overthrow the tanks and planes of a dictator, but I wouldn't listen.

They say, "A vote cast for someone who isn't a Democrat or a Republican is a wasted vote."

They say, "It takes rich people and lots of money to win an election."

I don't believe them and neither should you.

We say, "We can vote for the man or woman who will do the best job; we're done letting permanent politicians tell us who to vote for."

We say, "Y'all had your chance, and you made everything worse."

I say, "We're the greatest people on Earth; we can elect whoever we want!"

I say, "We can have roads that don't give us flats and police officers who keep us safe. We deserve it, and it's our right as taxpayers."

I say, "Let's do this our way!"