2011: yes YOU can.
Saturday, January 1, 2011 at 5:11PM Hello readers! Hope you had a safe and fun New Years eve celebration. Only one burst of celebratory gunfire new our Alexandria home. While I support my fellow citizens rights under the 2nd Amendment, just a word to the wise: what comes up must also come down. A bullet fired into the air can, and does descend with enough velocity to kill.
With that out of the way, this is now the official "Obigatory start of 2011 New Years Post!."
Here in 2011, the question remains: What do you want the government to do, to not do, and how to do it? This is a question that can never be answered, completely, once-and-for-all, in a democracy. But this is not a cause for despair, it is a cause for celebration. For it means that no matter how badly the ruling elite of botched things up at home and abroad, we, the people, have the ability to make things right. The history of our own nation is an example. After throwing off the yoke of British oppression, the Founding Fathers, with all of their visionary system, chartered a system of government called the Articles of Confederation (the predecessor to the Constitution).
It was a total failure. The system was broken. It did not work. At all.
So they fixed it. A constiutional convention was called, and a brand spanking new Constitution was drawn up, and everything was grand!
Except that it wasn't. They forgot a few minor details such as: Freedom of speech, separation of state and church, right to bear arms, due process, and all the really good stuff we think of as essential to democracy.
The point being is that our leaders (and us) are flawed, and we will rarely, if ever, get things right on the very first try. That is why one of my favorite parts of the constitution comes from the Preamble "We the People of the United States, in order to form a more Perfect Union..." This means that the process of forming our government and our society in general is an evolution, marked by mistakes, blunders, and (hopefully) corrections.
The Green Party is the same way. It is not driven by the powerful elite of our nation, it is driven by "We The People." We are far from perfect, but by holding true to our shared values of: Grassroots Democracy, Social Justice, Ecology, and Non-Violence, we can do better than what we are doing now.
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Daryl Northrop
