How Should We Approach Politics and Can it Solve Our Problems?

          We can't help but see what happens when many tragedies and crimes dominate the news. The public follow the story, get deeply involved and outraged and become stirred to action on an issue that was, before that time, overdue to be addressed. But usually these high-profile stories are symptoms of problems that are deeper, more basic and older and so can't be fixed directly. Because we can't change hearts or human nature, we focus on proposing legislation that we hope will minimize the effects of the epidemic we want to alleviate. We circulate petitions. We write, call or send email messages to our legislators. We base our votes on how our politicians respond to our concerns. If we are able, we may engage in civil disobedience, protests or marches or lobby our legislators. Whether our political leanings fall closer to the left of people's views or to the right of people's views, many of us either don't pay attention to politics and see its relevance in our lives or we see it as able to save us in some way. And whatever the level of our involvement in the democratic process, we so often get mad at, even hate those in power when they fail to live up to our expectations.
          It's forever true that politics has power to affect every area of our lives, up to a point. So much voter apathy exists because many people don't see that. Politicans make many promises and trash their opponents, scaring us about the dire consequences of supporting the opposition. That happens every campaign season and it is happening in the US political scene. But is seems that when tragedy strikes, we recognize, almost to excess, what politics can do for us. For example, one girl, with the full support of her parents, went public with the account that one night some boys forced her to drink herself unconscious and then raped her. As a result "Breanna's Law" was proposed and passed. This law was meant to broaden the definition of rage and empower kids to report sex crimes by peers. Most of us know about the lifesaving "Amber Alert" program. It was created because of the brutal rape-murder of 9 year old Amber Hagerman, whose murder remains unsolved. Thanks to this legislation many kids, fortunate enough to meet the program's strict criteria, have been rescued alive and reunited with their families. A college girl, Kristin Smart, vanished about 12 years ago but law enforcement officials (LEO's) didn't start investigating her case until she was missing for three weeks. Because of her presumed murder, the "Kristin Smart Campus Safety Act" was created. After 17 year old Chelsea King's brutal rape-murder over 2 years ago, "Chelsea's Law" was created to make it easier to track registered sex offenders and hold them accountable for their crimes in California where Chelsea was killed; it has yet to become law in all 50 US states. Recall the massacre at Columbine High School at Littleton, Colorado 12 years ago where 12 students and one teacher were murdered before the two gunmen killed themselves. After this massacre, families of some victims lobbied for tougher gun laws while other families of victims appealed to Congress to bring back prayer to public schools. We can be thankful for vastly increased bullying awareness and often, when news of a bullycide victim dominates headlines, anti-bullying legislation is proposed and sometimes passed into law. Some families with missing loved ones and a number of advocates are lobbying Congress for "Billy's Law," named after Billy Smolinski (who is still missing) which is supposed to make solving cases through the NamUs missing/unidentified database much easier through linking both of them. I can go on and on.
          With all the strong emotions that so many of us bring to our political debates that tend to deteriorate into shouting matches, outright fights or even worse, it's like many of us think politics can solve whatever issue we care passionately for as based on our view, whether left-leaning or right-leaning. Laws keep getting passed that are supposed to make and keep us, our families and our children safer and grant us more rights. And now, with our worries about the the economy and the federal deficit and its effect on us, many politicians want to undo some of these laws and make cuts to many programs set up to make us, our familes and our children safer. So today, we are facing this problem in reverse. It's called "spending cuts" in the name of balancing the budget which I already blogged about recently so I won't elaborate here. Whatever politicians do to our existing laws or to proposed legislation, do our lives actually get much better or worse or do they stay pretty much the same? We keep passing laws designed to keep kids safer but are they actually safer now? Maybe. Maybe not. All we can see is that, every day, kids continue to be reported as missing and too many continue to be found dead or not found at all; for the same reason, in the US alone there remain over 40,000-60,000 unidentified people, most dead, some living. Students keep getting bullied and just today, I heard about one more boy's life lost to bullycide. Child abuse stories regularly make the news with depressing frequency. Abortions continue at the same rate (an estimated 4000 per day) despite numerous all the efforts and proposed legislation on the part of so many "anti-abortion, pro-life" lobbyists. Right-leaning people bank on Republicans being in power to end abortion and win the "culture wars." Pastors and prominent religious leaders often admonish people of faith to protect the unborn with our votes, which usually means to vote for Republicans. However, after many years of Republicans being in power until these past four years, the abortion epidemic remains.
          I well remember the time up to and after President-Elect Obama was just elected, including when his victory was announced. "Change" was the buzzword then and many voters at the place our family voted at, wore pins saying, "I voted for change today." On the night of newly-elected Obama's victory, the TV showed the site of his victory celebration. So many people were gathered to celebrate their candidate's victory that this sea of humanity looked like ants! So many voters looked to him to bring about the "Change" that he had run on in his campaign. They were disgusted at the mess that this President-Elect had inherited: a recession, rising unemployment, rising foreclosures of homes, failing banks, and two wars. Candidate Obama had made many promises during his campaign and the hopes of his supporters were running high that he could save us and do it soon. However, the recession didn't turn around fast enough, people still kept losing their jobs and losing their homes. The banks kept failing and we still had two wars to fight. Obama supporters, in large numbers, became disappointed in the person they looked to as their savior. Why wasn't this President keeping his campaign promises? Why was he letting us down? Why wasn't he fighting hard enough for us? Where is his leadership? Where is the change he promised? President Obama would trying to calm people, saying, "Folks, Rome was not built in a day. Change takes time. We are dealing with long-term problems and things may get worse before they ultimately get better. I call on you to have patience." His opponents, especially T.E.A. Party politicians and supporters, sought to ruin the President at every turn. Whether by his disappointed supporters or fierce opponents, far too many people have been vilifying, trashing and persecuting the President and making no secret of their hate, jealousy and spite. This bitterness  is so toxic that there is a popular Facebook cause which I support, "Join the Fight to Stop Dishonoring the President."
          The hypocrisy of politicians and their hard-core supporters amazes me. Right-leaning leaders, in and out of politics, continue to grumble and agitate about a "government take-over" and call the current President a "socialist." Yet these same right-leaning leaders seem to want to turn the US into what amounts to a theocracy where they want to limit women's access to birth control pills and mandate abortion-minded women to view ultrasounds before getting abortions. Now I'm against abortion and support woman being truthfully told the risks of this procedure which has lasting consequences, but should they be coerced into this? When a religious leader asked Jesus a related question about mixing politics and religion, Jesus' reply to him was this: "Render to Ceasar what is Ceasar's and to God what is God's." Trying to make a nation a theocracy doesn't work. God ordained theocracies in the OLd Testament days for Israel alone, under His Old Covenant with them. When Jesus, who was apolitical, came to Earth as a man and was dragged before politicans before His death, He said to one of them: "I'm not an earthy king. My Kingdom is not of this world." He came to set up a New Covenant between God and us where the Kingdom of God would exist in people's hearts and lives. Besides, we see theocracies in the form of many Muslim countries. Do we want systems that even remotely resemble theirs even with Christianity or another religion being the state religion?
          Many have expressed concern over and opposition to the "Individual Mandate" in the "Obamacare" Affordable Health Care Act, calling it unConstitutional and coercive and invasive of people's "right to choose." This mandate would require everyone to purchase some form of healthcare insurance for themselves and their families. From what I can gather, people would be asked to pay only what they can afford. It's clear that something must be done to adress soaring health care costs, combined with the rising number of 50 million uninsured people in the US. Yet do we want to see health care costs continue to soar because uninsured people, because of no other options, use hospital emergency rooms as their primary health care providers?
          And so on and on. But whatever political party is in power at any given time, things may improve or get worse up to a point, yet our underlying problems continue. And when individual politicians are able to force their agendas on their citizens, we have seen what has often happened. Wasn't a certain politician's effort to force his "utopia" on his citizens the reason for something we know as the Holocaust? Isn't this and widespread human rights abuses brought about by totalitarian societies the biggest argument for democacy with its flaws brought about by flawed politicians?