A Solid Government- A Fourth Path

-Men enter into society to protect their property. -John Locke I. On the need for an Ordered Society. Government is necessary. It is the means by which we lay the foundation of society and manage its maintenance. And its current form is something that saved us from the Dark Ages, and stood for a thousand years. We count on the government to protect the security of our persons and our property, and we count on it for the upkeep of the shared infrastructure that makes society possible. Without it, there would be not only no police- there would be no roads, no hospitals, no firefighters. It's a crucial lifeline that all humans depend on- and yet, today, so many people resent and even hate it. This is a terrible error. There were only three paths available in this life for humans before ordered government- predator, prey, and outcast. The Fourth Path is the responsible citizen, which cannot exist without society. Nobody likes being told what to do. This is obvious, and not unfair. Certainly there is a thin line between governance and tyranny. This is what makes it so necessary that we, the People, become active participants in the system that watches over us all. It was designed by humans, to care for other humans. It is ours, and this needs to be understood. If radicals on the left and right succeed in pulling it loose at the moorings due to misunderstanding and lack of foresight on the middle class, it will be to the tremendous detriment of all mankind. So how did it come to this? After all, as recently as the 1950's, everybody seemed very happy. The way they tell the story, corporations were sleek and productive, the people were prosperous and upright, and the government was stern but benevolent. The Nazis were gone, Europe was dependent on us for everything, and once the mighty Stalin died we had far less to fear from Russia. Just where did it all go wrong? Many changes took place in society over the next several decades. The Vietnam War is probably the most direct cause of citizenry both at home and abroad losing confidence in the government of America. The same government once so beloved as a guardian and protector, came gradually to be viewed as a correctional officer and an oppressor. by the very people it watches over. Certainly it is easier to create than destroy, but why the constant increase of acrimony, even when steady increase and progress has been made in regard to human rights for people across the spectrum? Who does it benefit, to have such a polar atmosphere existant between the people and its representatives? Perhaps the most natural place to start is with the farewell address of President Eisenhower, who warned us specifically against the influence of the newly formed military- industrial complex, a term coined by him. In Eisenhower's memoirs, a letter to his wife Mamie is included, in which he wrote to her, "God help this country, if anyone ever gets into office who doesn't understand the military as well as I do". His successor was John F. Kennedy, and the story of how that worked out will remain one of America's most enduring legends. http://coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/indust.html II. Ratf*cking. As any student of Watergate knows, "ratfucking" was a term coined by Donald Segretti, a political operative in Nixon's Political Committee to Re-elect the President (CRP). Segretti, as well as a number of other officials in the Nixon White House, developed this term and the strategies it entailed to classify the dirty tricks they ran in student elections when they all were at the University of Southern California. Segretti and another CRP member, Dwight Chapin, were to transfer these techniques to our national elections in favor of Richard Nixon. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/onpolitics/watergate/donaldsegretti.html The basics of the fundamentals of ratfucking are as follows. First, it is essentially nihilistic. It considers political sabotage for its own sake to be a worthy goal, in and of itself. There doesn't necessarily have to be an obvious purpose or obvious logic behind it. Everything is simply tactics. The point is to muddy the waters, and to force your enemy to waste time and resources trying to see clear to the bottom. All politics is a essentially a zero-sum game of power; you win and the other guy loses. Watergate was uncovered, of course, and they didn't get away with it, but the repercussions have echoed. The two parties were to gradually stop viewing each other as opponents, and to start viewing each other as enemies. Of course, this applied to the supporters of the parties as well. Trust was broken, and things were going to get worse. www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a25090/donald-segretti-ratfking-100413/ II. The Widening Gyre. Journalist Ronald Brownstein wrote in his book The Second Civil War, “What’s unusual now is that the political system is more polarized than the country. Rather than reducing the level of conflict, Washington increases it." One of the ways in which this takes place is when a candidate appears on the spectrum with highly extreme views and a gift for public speaking, e.g. Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders. Brownstein believes that Trump actually likes chaos, a trait shared by other dictators as well, such as Hitler or Shi-huang-ti of China's Qin dynasty, who would engender purposefully such a state of affairs among their own ministers, so as to keep them squabbling and dependent. http://www.mediaite.com/tv/cnns-ron-brownstein-trump-likes-chaos-he-thinks-it-benefits-him/ The extreme candidate's adherents have the effect of driving more moderate candidates further and further away from one another. Two people who started out not so different become polar opposites from distant planets. This unfortunate process complicates the addressing of critical issues, such as disaster relief, or economic crisis. Major issues, ones requiring bipartisan cooperation. This has the effect of putting serious and unnecessary pressure on the commonwealth, as well as increasing the possibility that someone truly radical seizes power, and does some radically unpleasant things with it. http://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1097&context=curej The creation of a sensible foreign or domestic policy is also more difficult. All these difficulties slow things down. This can often mean that at critical times, people are left high and dry, as the example of Hurricane Katrina so acutely illustrated. Katrina hit the last week of the month on August 29, 2005. Many lives were lost because poor people simply did not have the money to get on the bus and go. Aid was offered by nations worldwide, but George W. Bush would not take it, at first. He proudly insisted that the United States was strong enough to withstand the disaster on its own. In large part, this was done because it best suited the narrative radical conservatives wanted to promote, regardless of the consequences. Many lives were lost (most of whom were minorities) to the negligence and sluggishness of this tepid and incomplete response. The PR coup Bush was hoping to score off the whole thing, did meet with some later successes, but this was mostly attributable to the involvement of Bill Clinton on the Aid for Katrina tour. http://www.brownpoliticalreview.org/2015/11/hurricane-katrina-and-american-isolationism/ And yet, there are still a few left who remember the days under FDR when government did work. It saved us from the Great Depression, and it gave us back our beer. Programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps, which built much of the infrastructure of our national park system, did a tremendous service to the nation. It raised morale by employing young men and giving them a way to use the labor power they were. Besides our morale victory, the federal government had rescued the country from the Great Depression. It had won two world wars. And it was using its power to bring about social justice in America. https://outdoorindustry.org/article/how-bringing-back-the-civilian-conservation-corps-could-reboot-our-public-lands/ This is of tremendous importance, and is in danger of being forgotten. If it weren't for the government, the big corporations would squeeze out all our independent attempts to make money, little by little, untill we were forced into a position where we would get in debt, and lose our belongings to creditors in the employ of the capitalist. Thus does the little guy lose his independence. His belongings are bought, and his labour is bought, He works on as before, having traded independence for stability. And the forming corporation keeps expanding. http://abcnews.go.com/Business/Economy/story?id=7708147 The government is the only power in the land capable of regulating this and restraining it with checks and balances. Presidents like Andrew Jackson fighting the banks and Grover Cleveland fighting the railroads come to mind. It is our government that stops big business from despoiling our fair land entirely. It gives us access to the courthouse, the great equalizer, the only means we have with which to fight them. Without it, we are nothing but a helpless rabble, up against organized monsters who control all the resources. The one singular hope we have of keeping anything we've got, is to maintain a good government.

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