With the barrage of political ads and arguments about who would be the best president to choose this year, a common theme that I’ve heard from many people is that they’d rather have another option than this year’s candidates. The perspective that many people carry is that government is corrupted, but it’s rare to hear a well-developed idea to really change it.
To me, it seems like the people who I would like to see in office don’t want to put their name on the ballot, and that probably has something to do with what the presidency does to a person. Just look at how much Bush and Obama aged during their presidencies:
Whether this rapid aging has to do with the stresses of being president or not is debatable, but I get the feeling that presidents feel a lot older than they are by the time they leave office. Maybe they lose a little bit of heart every time they have to bend from their values to appease their advisors or congress.
The problem I see with our government doesn’t have anything to do with the stresses of the presidency. I see elected officials who do not represent their population very well. They might say they will vote one way or another on bills when running for office, but the pressures of Washington tend to bend politicians towards money rather than what their people say. I’m not saying this is true for all politicians, but it does seem to be a common trend.
How can this issue ever be fixed? Money tends to equal power in America, and even more so in Washington. There have been campaigns to vote a lot of congress out of office, but even if that worked, the manipulative money is still there to corrupt the new elects. What if there was a way to get the general population involved in the formation of laws and bills. I’m not talking about calling your Senator or Representative to try to convince them to vote a certain way. I mean actually taking part in the writing and editing of laws and bills.
This isn’t my idea, but I thought it was a good one as I have seen first-hand how it works in the technology world. Check out this TED video, and listen to what Clay Shirky has to say about “how the Internet will (one day) change government.”
