Sitting at a bar, Drinking a beer...

You learn a lot when you sit at a bar with a beer and just keep your mouth shut.  For one thing you realize how stupid alcohol can make otherwise intelligent people.  Or not.  Since I did not know the person sitting beside me I have no idea whether or not he was smart before the alcohol kicked in.  but he was having a conversation with an elderly lady about the two newsworthy stories yesterday.  Obama giving the eulogy for the pastor shot and killed in Charleston with 8 others, and the Supreme Court decision on Gay Marriage.  It was quite obvious that he was not a fan of either while the lady was impressed with both.  But somewhere in the conversation he commented that 'today was the end of democracy in America.'  And I was thinking that perhaps I, myself, do not have a complete understanding of what democracy is, but this is how the conversation went in my head:

“You’re an idiot.  If this were a true democracy, I might agree with you, but the reality is that we generally don’t put things to a ‘vote of the people’ because that is why we have representatives.  In a republic, we send people to Washington, D.C. to speak for us.  And they do our bidding with the caveat that there is a constitution that has to be considered in all laws that we enact.”  I think the architects of the constitution were very thorough, but still, there was no accounting for progress.

Here is what I think is the real issue.  We are at a shift in thought in our country where people are beginning to realize the importance of equality.  Gender, racial, lifestyle, etc, but the representation hasn’t caught on to it…yet.  One of the reasons is that the people we are sending to represent us, for the most part, are career politicians.  And if I were to define ‘career politician’ I would have to include the phrase ‘out of touch with regular folks.’  Another reason is that there are millions of people with thousands of different ideas on issues that are not always cut and dry and that there are not enough people in congress to adequately represent all of us.  But that muddies it even more, because to rectify it would require growing government.

Do you see the dilemma?  I certainly do.  And  honestly I have no idea how to fix it.  But we have to be conscious of the needs of the people.  All the people.  We the people.

Perhaps if I had had more than one beer I could have added to his conversation…thank God I only had one.