Face it, nothing meaningful is going to change until it is far too late.
This applies to all manner of issues, from climate change to gun control, the shredding of our Constitution to our penchant for endless war. There is going to be no meaningful progress on these issues until the crisis hits and we crash and burn. The simple reason for this is because it was designed this way.
The Founding Fathers set up our government to be a deliberative body, emphasis on deliberate. They, as many of the the elite worldwide at the time, while willing to experiment with a limited form of democracy, were desperately afraid of what they thought of as mob rule. That is why they set up some severe sanctions on who could vote, namely white, property owning males.
Furthermore, they set up our government so that change would come slowly, evolving over years, decades, even centuries. That is why the tools that can be used to radically change the direction of our country, such as amending the Constitution, were designed to be difficult to implement.
As time passed, the ruling elite added ever more layers, all designed to keep change not just at a reasonable pace, but at a snail's pace. Institutions, such as political parties, were set in place to take the brunt of the raw cry for immediate change and channel it into bureaucratic byways and backways.
This system worked, poorly in many instances, but still worked well enough to get us through nearly two hundred years of existence. But since the midpoint of the twentieth century, the pace of events has quickened, and our governmental system simply can't keep up.
For instance, our climate is changing at a rapid pace due to causes entirely man made. This fact has been known for forty years now, yet little has been done. Politicians have made great speeches, the public recognizes the problem and is demanding change, but all that impetus for change has been quelled once the issue of climate change hits DC. Sure, there have been token gestures, but the changes that we need to make now, needed to make twenty years ago, simply haven't been done because our government, even in the best of times, moves like molasses in January.
Worse, with the increasing pace of technology, the sheer number of issues that need to be dealt with quickly has skyrocketed. Thirty years ago, the issues of privacy and intellectual property that we face today simply didn't exist because the technology that manifested those problems didn't exist. Worrying about the privacy of your emails was a moot point when you didn't have email.
Now, as these issues continue to hit us at an ever greater speed, our government has dropped from a snail's pace to a virtual standstill. That isn't the fault of just the Republicans or just the Democrats, but both parties. It seems that they have gone from considering their roles to be that of public servants trying to provide leadership to an attitude that government is all about who scores the most point in their own personal grudge match. That is how a Democratic president, who proposed a health care reform model that was lifted virtually intact from the Republican playbook, now sees that selfsame Republican health care model labeled as "socialist".
I don't know what the solution to this problem is. Any attempt to address this problem through legislation or amending the Constitution is going to be drowned at birth by the very institution that is the problem. The Romans actually had the foresight to provide a solution to this problem in their government model, namely suspending the Senate and appointing a dictator, who had free rein to get things done quickly, for a certain pre-agreed period of time. Of course we saw how well that worked out when those self same dictators simply refused to step down, and had the army to back them up.
So the sad, stark fact of the matter is that these problems aren't going to be solved until we crash and burn as a nation. We are going to continue to watch as our civil liberties disappear, we're going to continue to see more and more of the well being of the ordinary people of this country sacrificed on the altar of the MIC, and the one problem that could very well end all problems, climate change, is going to continue unabated and destroy our country, civilization, possibly the human race.
I know that is a desperately cynical point of view, but hey, these are desperately cynical times. I've watched as this country burns, and DC continues to fiddle, for far too long to come to any other conclusion. My only comfort is that I'm old enough that while I will see the beginning, and possibly Act II of the end, I won't be around for the final act, when the shit really does hit the fan.
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