Politics is not a Spectator Sport

[mourningdove92]

Thought: "Fahrenheit 9/11" is Disney's loss, America's gain.

On Native Ground
POLITICS IS NOT A SPECTATOR SPORT
by Randolph T. Holhut
American Reporter Correspondent
Dummerston, Vt.

DUMMERSTON, Vt. -- "People often say, with pride, 'I'm not interested in politics.' They might as well say, 'I'm not interested in my standard of living, my health, my job, my rights, my freedoms, my future or any future.' Politics is the business of being governed and nobody can escape being governed, for better or worse. ... If we mean to keep any control over our world and lives, we must be interested in politics."

Journalist Martha Gellhorn wrote those words in 1984, when Reaganism and Thatcherism were at high tide and conservative philosophy had suddenly became respectable. Little did we know that, 20 years later, the world would change and not for the better.

A great deal of that change, I think, stems from the reality that so few Americans bother to get involved in the political process. When barely half of the nation's eligible voters bother to bestir themselves from their respective sofas and cast their ballots in a presidential election, something is wrong.

There are two ideas that have polluted our democracy in the last century - that money equals free speech and that corporations are entitled to the same rights as individuals. Together, they have contributed to the increasing concentration of wealth in the U.S. into the hands of fewer and fewer people. The top 1 percent of the U.S. population has nearly as much wealth as the bottom 95 percent combined.

With this wealth, the powerful can control our elections and our democracy. We have a single-party system (masquerading as a two-party system) that's under the near total control of corporate America. Voter turnout has steadily decreased over the past 50 years as Americans are turned off by the lack of real choices and the pervasive influence of big money in politics.
http://www.american-reporter.com/2,396W/1.html

this is a great article and worth the read.

[mark11727]

1. Politics *IS*, however, a CONTACT SPORT...

...so don't forget to wear a CUP.