Do you have the perception that Congress and the President cannot agree on issues and policy? Do you feel that the government is spinning it's wheels, or is in gridlock? Have you used or heard phrases like 'partisan politics', divisiveness', 'intransigence', or 'uncompromising'? Have you heard accusations that the other party won't budge, or won't cross the aisle? Have you heard politicians accuse the other of not acting in the interests of 'the American people'?
Are you therefore waiting for it to end? See it as a temporary phenomena? Waiting for the other side to come to it's senses? Thinking cooler heads will prevail? Thinking a savior will come along to "heal the divide" or reach across the political aisle? (Hope and Change).
Consider the possibility that it will not end. Our country may now be too big, too populated, and too ideologically diverse, for our current system of government to continue to function fluidly. We may have too many extreme desired outcomes, from too many divergent groups of political interests, for any reasonable compromise on any major single issue.
Have you considered that our current system of representative government is not actually broken, but rather that it is obsolete? Have you considered that the system, as designed so long ago, no longer works for this new America and is simply outdated? Was it designed for an America that no longer exists, hence the gridlock and slow forward motion?
The men that designed our independence from England, created our system of government, and wrote our Constitution, are often hailed as visionary prophets with an ability to see the future and designing documents for all time. How often have you heard the phrase 'the framers of our Constitution and government foresaw __________ '(insert applicable prophecy).
Without a doubt they were extraordinary pioneers but let us not forget they were mere humans, not clairvoyant men possessed of divine power. They designed a government to fit the immediate needs of the new country, and it's future needs - based on the world as they knew it! They were British citizens, not 'Americans'. They tailored their independence to rid themselves of particular disagreements with the British way of government. Their newly designed representative government was indeed designed to allow for competing differences and then find middle ground which most could agree to. The differences at the time were varying lighter shades of agreement and disagreement, and competing interests were only a few degrees apart, but operating from the same book, be it not on the same page. Agreements were relatively easy to come by.
At the time of independence, their country declared independent stretched about 900 miles long, a couple of hundred miles wide, and had 2.5 million people living in it. North America beyond that was unknown to the colonists at the time. Their country at the time was a tiny fraction the physical size of the United States known to us now. Prior to the Lewis and Clark expedition opening up the continent west of the Missouri River at the beginning of the 1800's, people in the U.S at that time literally thought monsters and unknown beings lived beyond the Missouri.
The human framers of our government would have had no idea that 250 years later the the country would stretch 3000 miles across, have 312 million people, (125 times their own population), be composed of dozens of ethnicities from 200 countries other than England, and speak dozens of languages other than English (British). In particular, the system they designed, would not have accounted for the possibility the these divergent groups would have local and self interests as the primary good and goal, rather than the interests of a overall fledgling country at large such as the one they lived in. They'd have had no concept that the independent 'colonies' of the future would have disagreements which were not limited to different pages of the same book as they were, but rather were not even in the same book, let alone the same bookshelf, let alone the same library.
Are we due for a rewrite?
