Let us never forget that government is ourselves and not an alien power over us. The ultimate rulers of our democracy are not a President and senators and congressmen and government officials, but the voters of this country.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

The system is fine.

We bear witness to the assassination of reason, to the nadir of rational discourse, and to the rise of the smarmy, self-absorbed, cult of personality that the American political landscape has become. But I assure you that the system is fine. Everything that our democratic experiment is designed to do still happens. The gears still turn. The pieces still connect. And the horrid-tasting product that it plops onto the conveyor and trundles along to our waiting mouths is colored and flavored exactly as intended by the Founding Fathers.

Our system is fine. The government offices do exactly what they are elected and appointed to do, and the political parties do exactly what we ask them to.

The failure is ours. We hold all of the power in our hand and simply wipe it on our jeans while we go to distract ourselves with cheap products, terrible services, and pointless endeavors. We barely exercise our right to vote, refuse opportunities for civic service, and poke a stick at the darkness with our back to our own fire when the monsters start pulling triggers, punching gas pedals, or swinging axes. Even when we do vote, we flick a lever or punch a chad or tap a video screen with begrudging effort, pushing ourselves back from the table of democracy as quickly as we can to avoid being asked to help with the dishes.

We lament a two-party system, at the adversarial us-versus-themness of it all. We rage at the unfairness of opposing forces locked into inactivity, of the lack of real choices, of actual options to represent us.

Well, why the hell should there be so many choices?

Look at what a glut of information has turned us into? You can hardly stroll down a single pavestone along the information superhighway before the fusillade of anger, hatred, greed, and pride comes tearing into you like a 50-caliber machine-gun loaded with endless belts of words poisoned by panic and fear. Our choices of interaction and communication, while endless, have been sharpened by our own hands into our singular spears that we use to jab at everyone around us.

Even when we manage to stumble across like-minded dread-eaters, we manage to only gather around that dim fire we share and shake our spears out into the darkness. And woe should we find fault with that tribe, for we’ll banish it, or ourselves, shaving and sanding down our comrades until the pin-point accuracy of our wants and desires are echoed completely, and we’ve found ourselves a nation comprised of 370 million individual tribes.

Compromise is lost. Tolerance is lost. Our tribes are all or nothing. And the nascent anonymity of usernames and fake profiles that once allowed the most angry and fearful of us to post all of our prejudices behind a digital mask has now evolved into the far more lurid anonymity of the mob. Impunity is held in the left hand while the other hand hurls the brick, knowing that apathy, exhaustion, or sympathy will still the hand of the remaining tribes when they move to banish the attacker.

When we demand that unwavering obedience by all to only our point of view, and 370 million points of view demand the same, how do you think that would look in the political arena? Ask Turkey what a coalition government demanding accountability from the leaders actually looks like.

No, the system is just fine. We could dynamite the lobbying system and strip the over-reaching eyes and ears of Big Brother and crush the corporate stranglehold on government in twelve years if we actually wanted. Three presidential cycles and two senate cycles to prove that not doing your job gets you fired. Easy as that.

But our tribes hate each other more than they hate the system. The Reds hate the Blues so much they will do anything to destroy the Blues. The Blues hate the Reds so much, they will do anything to destroy the Reds.

Compromise is lost. Tolerance is lost. Our tribes are all or nothing

Stop saying it’s the system that is broken. We are the system, and we break it or fix it at our leisure.

We are currently a nation on the phone screaming at the internet-provider

God forbid someone suggests its user error.