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A Democracy is Not a Choice Between Trump and Biden
Crappy candidates are a sure sign that we’re not living in a democracy.
If I don't look beyond the two dominant parties in America, I have two problems. I have a former president with 4 indictments. That means he has 4 criminal complaints filed against him. I have another candidate who could be charged with crimes, but he’s too senile to know what he was doing. I often wonder if he’s at the helm, who is running the country?
This is the power of our two dominant parties. They are so confident of their power, they can select and promote two old men, long past their prime age of productivity, and offer them up to us to vote on, as if there are no better alternatives out of 330 million people living in America today.
Biden spent 47 years in Congress helping to rig the economy for the wealthy, selling influence and getting rich. Trump gave money to both parties because “that’s how you get things done.” They are both well aware of, and play the influence game. Both of them have another problem. They both act like it's really important to make changes today, despite more than 40 years of activity that say otherwise.
So I see a certain smugness in the faces of the elites, you know, the dependent billionaire class. Like they’ve made some sort of calculation that as long as the rest of us are unaware, they will get what they want. And it would appear that more often than not, they get what they want.
In my nearly 60 years of living, I’ve watched patiently as others pursued and acquired power. And I’ve seen what power has cost them.
Power requires attention. Attention requires energy, and there is only so much energy that our bodies and brains can store and use at any given time. This is true regardless of what kind of power and how much power anyone has. Everyone has a limited store of power and a limited capacity to discharge that power, political or otherwise.
We have created an unsustainable concentration of power in the hands of the few. It is not really possible for so few people to make good decisions for the rest of us. Everything we do, everything we create, and everything we own requires attention. There is a discrete, non-divisible…
