In eleven months our country is going to engage in another national election to select our president and congressional managers. Right now the republican party is engaged in a series of primary elections to determine who will be its nomination for the office of president. And the president and the democratic party are engaged in a lot of maneuvers and discussions in efforts to deal with the problems that we are facing in our country. And we citizens are becoming more and more frustrated and dissatisfied by the ways Congress seeks to do our business and the president’s struggles to increase and to maintain his position as our “popular” leader. Is it possible to have Political Hope anymore?

How much hope do you have in our political processes that they can really correct our problems? I think that if our government was really viewed as a business by us citizens, we would have fired the CEO, the treasurer, and many department managers a long time ago for all the wasteful spending, lost of revenue, unused workers, increased debt, seriously questioned decisions that they made, and loss of confidence among our friends and even our “stock holders” that we have the ability to conduct our “business” in an intelligent and responsible way.

I know that some critics of the government have indicated verbally that this is what we should do. And some critics have formed a “Tea Party” to begin to move in the direction of making some major changes in how we do our “business” in Washington. But I don’t think that this organization or the discussions that seem to address some desirable changes that need to be made in this matter are really serious enough or basic enough in their proposed effects to make much of a difference in how we do our “business” in Washington.

Political Hope: Economy

Everyone seems to agree that our “economic” problem is the number “one” issue in our country, but there is no common consensus regarding how to fix it. A lot of workers are still not being used while the Republican candidates for the office of president argue about whether or not one of them was able to save jobs or did he lose jobs in his former position as a CEO in a business. And there is a lot of talk about the necessity to bring “exported” jobs back to America, but little real practical consensus on how to do that while many of our cities lay off teachers and firemen and police officers because they don’t have enough funds in their accounts to pay them.

I could go on describing the various specific problems that frustrate us in how we do our “business” together in Washington, but these are all pretty well known and currently being widely discussed. What political hope do you have that our political procedures will be able to “save” our joint “business” of government from a practical collapse? What specific steps do we as the “stock holders” in this business need to take this year in order to make some real differences in this matter? What can we do when so many of the “executives” and “managers” in our “business” of government seem to be more concerned about saving their jobs and benefits than they are in saving the “business”? Let’s talk about political hope!