Dictatorships

Recently, some footage of a large procession in North Korea celebrating either the country's or its rulers' birthday was displayed on the news here in Japan. Aside from the thought of how, "Any country that trains its troops to march exactly in step like that is wasting time, in a bad way, or both" and also the Nazi feel of the whole thing, I had some not so random thoughts.

I thought about how somewhere, someone must have (though I have not seen it) made a poster or shirt which said something like, "Important Dictators the American People should know about." Followed by pictures of Saddam, maybe Kim Jung Il and then Bush. I thought of how stupid a T-shirt that would be, because my perception of things is that actually, the Republican and Democratic parties are really the dictators, and the symbols for each should go onto the shirts.

Then I crashed continually earthward, rolling along a spiral staircase down into the depths of how bad one can percieve the US situation to be.

Basically, I had to then account for the fact that, while less important, the other political parties were really no good eggs either. Then, remembering I have a few good friends intending on becoming politicians, I had to accept that there are two groups, good politicians and bad politicians. So, I had to accept the fact that some of these politicians were in all parties.

So, the question began to be begged, "Why, if there are good politicians in all political parties as there must be, does the whose system seem to be such a bloody mess?" I may have my opinions on abortion and gay rights, and those are important humanitarian issues, but generally there are vastly greater issues to be dealt with, or at least there should be.

It strikes me that government, as with any mechanism, requires maintenance, otherwise it begins to deviate from its proper operation. It surprises me that the American government currently suffers from rather gaping flaws, which it routinely refuses to fix. The first is that, although I will accept it could be argued otherwise, that preemptive problem fixing is all but gone. What seems to be the normal course of things is that they are employed until broken, at which point they are fixed. This isn't an entirely wrongheaded way to do things, as many parts of life work the same way. Generally, it would be hard to annually unearth all of your plumbing and electric wiring to make sure it was in working order. However, your plumbing and electricity, assuming they in particular fail as opposed to everyone's electricity and plumbing, are not an immediate threat to you life if they fail unexpectedly. Inconvenient for sure, but not deadly. Government strikes me as more like planes, trains, and life sustaining medical devices. If any of those were to wait until something broke before it was fixed, no one would fly planes, ride trains, or trust life sustaining devices. There would be so many accidents from bad brakes and rusted out rails, loose bolts resulting in lost wings, and device failures it would be obscene.

The government controls all the millions of lives in the country, making it supremely important that it run properly. The eventual decisions regarding gay rights and abortion will be a part of that. However, it strikes me that no direct issues of government were important voting reasons the past presidential election. The closest thing was anything relating to the war, but that was more an issue of the running of the Iraqi government that anything else.

So, I have some deep concerns about government. As it stands, I have two close friends and budding Republican Presidential hopefuls sometime around when I'm 40. While I'm praying that things get fixed sooner than that (I'm not sure if we'll last long enough for them to save the sinking ship, or if there will be much to save when the time comes), I think I'm realistic in hoping and praying for a Rhea/Nolte '24 victory.

You two know who you are, go out there and whip those crocthety old fogey corrupt politicians into shape.