I wrote a long response then realized it would be taken wrong and no matter how many times I tried to rewrite it it still didn't read right.
Basically I think we need the electoral college to save us from ourselves. The SI community and the people we know personally outside SI tend to be non-representative of the rest of the US population. Remember that one night of WWF wrestling or roller derby or tough man competitions gets higher ratings than a whole year of CSPAN, NPR, PBS much less a night of listening to BBC etc. Never underestimate the stupidity of the American Public has been my number one saying since I can recall and it proves itslef everyday in story after story. Our news is so dumbed down compared with other countries it is disgusting. The average american knows more about batting averages of baseball players and the private lives of movie stars etc than they do about our own constitution, economics, global policy or even simple domestic geography, current bills up for legislation etc. Remember that "We are the World" was accepted as a wonderful cause despite three times the amount of money raised was spent by Ethopia on Soviet arms and submarine base construction that year but no one knew squat about why those people were starving or cared that we had almost as many hungry kids here at home at that time.
By wording a petition or poll a certain way, you can sway a vote one way or the other because people don't look at what the actual law pending is really saying, only what the dumbed down paraphrasing says. People will point to a politician shooting down a food for kids law saying how could he do this, not paying attention to the fact that there were 20 riders on the bill legislating that there would be enough pork barrel items on it to choke a horse or that they were going to grind up people to make soylent green etc. It is too much trouble to read the actual bill and besides, all that legal talk confuses them. Hey, it is publishers clearing houses fault that I quit my job, bought a new house and car etc. thinking I was a winner of 15 milliion dollars. DUH!!!!!
The majority is not always right and about 15 years from now, there will be a population swing that will make us thankful we have checks and balances in place to keep the inteligent minority in place, at least I hope so.
I have seen a slow but steady divergence of common sense in this country that scares the heck out of me. I agree with you that the system is corrupt, controlled by a minority and all you say. However I think that it is good for the country since majority vote would pass stupid stuff that would destroy us as a nation. If 6% of the population has most of the money, we could easily pass laws taxing them at 99% by majority vote. Would that be a good thing? Not when all our brightest people and visionaries left the USA and went somewhere else leaving us a stupid nation of under achievers.
This is about as far as I can go before getting myslef in trouble but hopefully you see where I am coming from.
Good Luck,
Lee |
