Just Who Are Americans these days?

Perhaps there should be a rule against quickly dashing off and posting a blog when you’re rushed, and in a foul mood.  But I just saw an advertisement for Identigene’s DNA Paternity Test.  In morbid curiosity (no personal need, I assure you!) I quickly Googled a bunch of other products and services that cheerfully ask, in essence, “find out who knocked you up!”

I hope you’ll pardon me the crude talk.  But what’s beneath all this is even cruder, when it comes to politics.

Because politicians never actually lead; they only reflect.  It’s not just that “all government is by consent of the governed.”  It’s more that all governments are the governed.

When Spartans stopped being Spartan, Sparta was no more.  When the America of our founders ceased to be American as defined by the founders, that America was no more.  That happened about a hundred years ago.

I’ll not bore you with the details (unless you ask, or even look as though you might be about to ask).  And I’ll not now start quoting the founders on morality, Christian society, and so on.

But it is critical to mention the Rule of Law as opposed to the Rule of Tyrants. 

We have become so degenerate – we have devolved so far back to our primordial default, that even the idea that politicians must obey constitutional limits as written seems foreign to us.

Sad, but not historically unusual or surprising.  The power-mad do not want limits on their power, do they?  So authoritarianism and societal collapse is in fact what always happens sooner or later.  I’d hoped for later.

I’m not fooling myself about my personal odds in the upcoming election.  We are a nation, after all, that cries for change and votes for incumbents essentially every time (over 98%).  We fall ever-more in debt yet clamor for more and more cheap stuff into which we pour more money, more time, more work, more debt.  We know everything about sports and celebrities, but nothing about those who take our money, print up more, make up the rules of our lives, and, more and more often these days, kill us for their own purposes and power.  We put our hand on our hearts and reverentially promise to obey a flag, but we’ve never even read the constitutions that once defined our social and legal fabric.

Oh, and apparently, we don’t know who knocked us up.

No, I’m not fooling myself.  The incumbent will win by a comfortable margin, as always, and we’ll tumble into failure, just as all such foolish and corrupt people do.

And yet I do hope.  I pray.  I pray a lot that we’ll stop at this brink and turn around.  And so I’m running for the constitutional office of “cop of the Indiana Constitution,” Indiana Governor.  I’m offering to be the first one of those in a hundred years.  All I can do is present the offer; voters (and non-voters) will choose.

Because elections aren’t about candidates at all.  They’re about those who’re choosing.  And our choices have been pretty awful lately.