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.

 

I have a rather large yard, nearly an acre. With the house and some areas where the trees have shaded the grass and delivered it from growth, that still leaves a considerable amount of lawn to mow. The lawnmower I own is a self-propelled gas-powered walk-behind, needing 3 hyphens to describe it and 85 minutes on average for it to mow the entire yard.

My neighbor, my wife, my co-workers have all sung a similar tune in their inquiry.

“Why not get a riding mower?”

Riding mower. Sure is quicker to say, and probably would cut down considerably on the time needed to mow the lawn.

The quickest solution would indeed be to drop a grand or two on a riding mower. Quicker mow. Done and done. Swift sculpting of wide swaths of blank yard then back to the rest of my day.

I have instead taken the avenue of attack that has me reducing the amount of lawn needed to mow, rather than simply getting more mower. I have a deck planned, and some landscaping, and every bit I plan and install, cuts down my mowing time and builds to the curb-appeal and use-ability of the yard. A gazebo is planned, and a large deck, and a fire-pit swing-set.

This will certainly take longer, will not be easier, and will let me make a much better use of my yard. It’s design is specific to having more people use my lawn with me.

Because ultimately I’m a rich white guy. Not an “American rich white guy”. Oh no, nothing like that. I called a friend of mine a “rich white guy” a few weeks ago and he was quick to correct me that he wasn’t rich. I didn’t have a stack of pictures from Kibera, Karachi, or District 9 in order to disabuse him of the notion that he wasn’t well-off, at least in the global sense.

Yeah, you caught me. District 9 was a movie. But the filming was done in an actual Johannesburg slum. 

In the global village, in the earthly metropolis that is this planet hurtling through space, I am better off than the vast majority of people, and if inviting my friends and neighbors to share at my table is a component of The Galactivist, than that’s fine with me. And the tilted table we eat off of is an essay for another day.

So, what does this have to do with anything?

I find parallels for my views on my lawn with the current debate regarding guns. I think far too much argument has gone on with regard to the metaphorical need for a smaller or larger mower, and not enough on limiting the need for a mower at all.

I understand the Second Amendment and support it fully, because I don’t trust our government to do the right thing all the time. I don’t think that our leaders would be foolish enough to direct martial forces against We The People, their cash cow. We’re not Iraq, or Saudi Arabia, or Nigeria. We don’t get our money from resources pulled from the ground by slaves. Our power comes from the tax base, and the more citizens paying into the circus the better. Mowing down a few million of us would negatively affect their profit margin and that’s the last thing that they want. So, at this specific juncture in human evolution, there is still a need for a very real fear in the United States for armed insurrection and rich people being shot in their homes to keep the monsters in power a tad fearful of pushing the boundaries too far. The second Amendment, the separation of powers, and our ‘peaceful’ rebellions every four years keeps that further from us than the end-of-times depressives would have you believe.

So I fail to see the need for someone to need an assault style rifle to defend themselves or their home. The numbers for defense with rifles just don’t add up. I get that people feel ‘safer’, and I think it’s all driven by fear and money, the top two enemies of the Galactivist in practice. Preying on human fear and weakness for profit is the most American of art forms, right up there with jazz and comic books. And I do not find any progress in a debate where one side is afraid that their guns are going to be confiscated, and another side that wants them banned for all the wrong reasons.

Confiscate your gun? Gods forbid. It should never come to that. Instead, we should work on reducing the fear that drives us to clench these weapons tighter and tighter, like a steel placebo in the hands of the frightened.

I will strive to make my proverbial yard somewhere to relax and contemplate, and less of a burden of labor that needs to be tended to as quickly and easily as possible. My conviction is that we need to build the dialogue of this with a goal of community growth in mind, and without the goals of profit and threat.

Happy Captain Picard Day!

In the interest of a life paid forward, we celebrate today with NASA’s intent to get to Mars. Their Journey To Mars certainly blasts beyond the movies and Disney rides in an effort to understand what it will take to get us to the Fourth Rock from the Sun. The considerations of what challenges lie ahead for a journey of this magnitude, and the innovations it will drive, are exactly the type of thinking and teamwork we need as a race.