Most crescendos are followed by a lull period

Let’s hope it works in American primaries and caucuses, and here’s why. American voters should be in charge, but they are not. Candidates, who are volunteers by the way, and their very professional hired staffs (funded by contributions), are in charge. Now this is something we can change, and should change. But even on a day called “super Tuesday” all the names on the ballots are selected for us, and any amount of sincere noise by the most enthusiastic voters is tinged by the obvious. We can choose among those selected for us, but cannot choose to select those who do the best for us. Now that is a crummy deal. But this has been happening for decades, and now it seems even to be more in your face. “Take it” or “leave it”, it seems.

The “leave it” types seem to avoid the obvious, that things will collapse of their own weight, eventually. And they may be right, but again, they are probably not right. Moody’s gave us a good forecast not too long ago, and the national borrowing ratings change (for the worse) is predicted around 2016 or so. And for those that record we cannot predict the future, especially the doom and gloom stuff, they are right. But in the same vein, the Naval Academy graduated the Class of 1941 early in February 1941, to send young men to the fleet earlier and in anticipation of the coming war. So we Americans can look at the same events and make different decisions. The “take it” types are even riskier. The operating assumptions that American hegemony, based on previous super power thinking, and the most idealistic leadership by example, may just encourage the type of behavior these fellow Americans hope to change. Too many eastern thinking people take our practices as weakness and even moral surrender. That they are wrong is obvious to us, but what they think is more important when it turns into attacks on our country and our culture. The rub is that many Americans don’t want to take the chance of poor judgments all-around taking down their and their families quality of life that is so special in the USA. Idealism and enthusiasm is fine, but a little judgment and hedging one’s practices is a voting issue. Of course it is especially a voting issue if we choose to make it so. Having kids is an amplifier.

So who chooses who will run our federal, state, and local elected offices, all 515,000 of them. Is it the present two national parties (and their self anointed elite leaders), which we Americans have invented and supported over the last half century or so? Or is change in the air, where we can select our own leaders vice accepting the volunteers and the national parties that promote them. Since our land is the new world, we can do things much better than our ancestors from the old world did. Of course, this is why they came here. In the meantime, enjoy the lull after the crescendos of “super Tuesday”.