I was watching a PBS NOVA episode recently and this scientist said something interesting related to the Parker space probe that was sent towards the sun a few years ago. She said that the idea for the probe originated in the 1950’s but that “they had to wait for the technology to catch up to the dream”.
Had to wait for the technology to catch up to the dream.
I thought about that comment because it really struck a chord with me. In the world of politics and elections, we have the reverse problem, and its entirely due to the two party system.
The technology is already here for a better functioning democracy. It’s the dream that’s lacking. The vision, the desire, the will to make it happen.
We can run elections that are more efficient, saving time & money. We can shorten the election calendar so that our citizens aren’t burned out & tuned out.
We can hold elections that are more positive, solution-oriented, and get us better candidates.
All because of technological advancements, from ranked choice voting to online voting.
So why instead do we have a never-ending, super expensive, 24/7/365 election cycle filled with negativity, divisiveness, and poor outcomes? Because the duopoly would prefer the broken system that they currently know how to win under instead of a better system that they might have more competition under.
It doesn’t matter if you tell them that a better system will help them to be the best versions of themselves.
When the fox controls the henhouse, it isn’t going to give up control even if it knows the henhouse is leaking when it rains. It would almost rather see the henhouse burn down before relinquishing control.
So how do we get the American Dream to catch up to the technology? By spreading the word, educating our fellow citizens, one at a time if need be. Even the mightiest waterfall starts with a single drop of water.
During the course of our family’s vacations and traveling around the country over the years, we often included going to see the homes of past Presidents, such as George Washington, and in more recent years a lot of Presidential Libraries, where many of the Presidents are buried.
On our most recent trip last month we visited 4 more Presidential Libraries and the graves of 3 Presidents and their spouses/families, and it got me to thinking about how many total homes, libraries, and graves of past Presidents I’ve seen.
Homes (15)–Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson, Van Buren, Polk, Lincoln, Grant, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower (2), JFK.
The first time I remember saying a silent prayer at one of their graves was when we visited Mount Vernon in the summer of 2016, because especially beginning with that election it seemed like our nation was hopelessly destined to continue the never-ending partisan wars that Washington warned us about in his farewell address.
Ever since that graveside prayer at Washington’s tomb, I’ve repeated a similar version at the tombs of Thomas Jefferson (even though it was pouring rain and I didn’t have an umbrella), Madison, FDR, GHW Bush, Truman, Lincoln, and Eisenhower.
In my silent prayer I thank them for their service, what they did for our country and the world, I thank God for having given them to us, and I share my concern for our country, and ask them and God to help me and my fellow Americans to live up to their example.
I can tell you that at each grave it has been a moving experience to stand only feet away from these great Americans, perhaps the most emotional one was GHW Bush because I had actually met him when I was in college, and the most meaningful to me was Lincoln because he’s my all time favorite President.
As soon as I was done with my short silent prayer each time, particularly at Lincoln’s tomb, I couldn’t help but feel a palpable vibe of “we’ve done our part, it’s up to your generation now, make us proud.”
Was that my prayer being answered, that quickly, or was it just my own internal sense of empathy for what these people had been through, done, stood for, and died for, that I shouldn’t be asking anything more of them now that they’ve given their last full measure of devotion? My gut tells me it was the latter, but who knows.
When we were at Eisenhower’s grave a few weeks ago there is a prayer hanging overhead that says “The Presidents Prayer” and the text is as follows:
“Almighty God, as we stand here at this moment, my future associates in the executive branch of the Government join me in beseeching that Thou will make full and complete our dedication to the service of the people in this throng and their fellow citizens everywhere.
Give us, we pray, the power to discern clearly right from wrong and allow all our words and actions to be governed thereby and by the laws of this land.
Especially we pray that our concern shall be for all the people, regardless of station, race, or calling. May cooperation be permitted and be the mutual aim of those who under the concept of our Constitution, hold to differing political beliefs–so that all may work for the good of our beloved country and for Thy glory. Amen”
Dwight D Eisenhower
One final note, it certainly wasn’t planned this way, but Eisenhower’s was the last grave we visited, and our future travel plans for the foreseeable future years probably won’t take us to any other Presidential sites or graves, but I’m glad it worked out that Ike’s was the last one we visited, and that it was on the same trip as when we saw Lincoln’s, and that Ike’s had that special prayer on display.
Now, it’s up to me and you to do our part, to make them proud. And if by chance you ever get to visit any of their final resting places as well, please do. You won’t regret it.
As you may already know, there’s been a social media trend of saying what your Roman Empire is, because apparently someone said that most guys think about the Roman Empire at least once a day.
Now, I’m a history buff, and love me some Roman Empire, but I had to laugh when I heard about it because I truly don’t think I think of the Roman Empire all that often.
To be sure, there are absolutely huge lessons for us to learn from it though and apply to our current times, particularly as they relate to internal decline, overextension of the military, and the resulting fall of the empire.
I WAS thinking about it recently though when world events made me think about the term “Pax Romana”, so I decided to re-read about it and make it the subject of my March blog post because, well, the Ides of March and all that Et Tu Brute stuff.
When I was reading about the Pax Romana the following passage really struck me as so relevant to our modern American situation of perpetual hyperpartisan division….
“Augustus faced a problem making peace an acceptable mode of life for the Romans, who had been at war with one power or another continuously for 200 years. Romans regarded peace not as an absence of war, but as a rare situation which existed when all opponents had been beaten down and lost the ability to resist. Augustus’ challenge was to persuade Romans that the prosperity they could achieve in the absence of warfare was better for the Empire than the potential wealth and honor acquired when fighting a risky war.”
Our political parties have been at war with each other for over two centuries. Do we Americans even know truly what peace between political parties even looks like?
Sure there have been fleeting and temporary moments of bipartisan cooperation over the years, but usually it has been because of an external threat or a problem so urgent and large that both parties found it more beneficial to work together in the short term than to just wait for the next election and hope they won more offices than the other party.
The reason those moments have been so fleeting and temporary is because our system of government and elections was designed to be adversarial instead of collaborative. Don’t blame The Founders though, they did the best they could with what they knew at the time and they truly did invent a better mouse trap for their time.
But modern times and modern problems demand modern solutions.
We know what the solution is….re-design our system of government and elections to encourage and incentivize parties, candidates, and branches of government to work together to solve problems and to do so proactively (when the problems are smaller and solutions less costly).
We know what that re-design looks like…nonpartisan reforms like ranked choice voting, open primaries, campaign finance reform, etc.
We know how to get that re-design implemented….citizen ballot initiatives in the 20+ states that allow them, and to get the other states’ legislatures to pass similar measures, as well as the US Congress.
We know that simple sentence above is an almost impossibility given how entrenched our current system is and how profitable it is for those in it, even when they themselves know it is broken.
What we don’t know is who will be our Octavian (Caesar Augustus) to rise up and have the ability and interest to make these deep and much needed changes to how our country operates?
And an even bigger question, should we even be waiting for a single savior to come along while DC flounders and the peoples’ problems suffer from neglect?
I would argue that this Ides of March, maybe the lesson from the soothsayer is to stop putting our hopes in single individuals, and instead each of us needs to do our part to rescue our future so that for the next 250 years America won’t continue to repeat the mistakes of the last 250 years.
A true Pax Americana is possible, both home and abroad, will you do your part?
February is always an interesting month to me. My brother’s birthday is on the 1st, on the second we throw science to the wind in favor of folklore to predict the weather, then we have a series of holidays….from America’s unofficial national holiday of Super Bowl Sunday, to Valentine’s Day, and Presidents Day, and all month long we commemorate Black History Month. Every 4 years we get an extra day too.
As I think about each of those individually and collectively, I keep seeing the same themes….we have come a long way as a country, still a long way to go, lots of good times to smile back and remember, lots of bad and sad times too, and overriding it all, a reminder that it’s the journey, not the destination that counts.
It’s the people we spend time with, the places we see, the things we do to pass the time and mark the years off the calendar that matter most.
That even in the darkest and most barren days of the depths of winter when for most of the country Spring is still too distant an idea, that we can choose to find things to celebrate while we wait for greener and sunnier days.
As I type this during the sometimes odd feeling interlude between Christmas and New Years, I find myself getting more contemplative about the year ahead and reflective of the year now coming to a close.
Both for individuals and for the country and world as a whole, some years are forgotten, some are a blur, some are chock full of cherished memories and great accomplishments, others stained and marred by heartache, loss, and tragedy, but most years have some mix of all of the above.
No one can accurately predict what a new year will bring, but here’s what I do know….2024 will be a decisive year.
It will either be a year where America emphatically rejects fascism and authoritarianism at home, or allows it to continue to grow.
It will either be a year where America continues to soberly accept its leadership role in world affairs or decides to step back from the stage and hastens its own decline in the process.
Here’s what else I know about 2024, both for ourselves individually and for our country. It will be what we make of it.
Now, people like countries are not in control of their own destinies entirely.
There is chance, luck, the decisions of others, the lies we tell ourselves, the truths we accept or reject, the effort we put in or choose not to put in, and the self-defeating fears that keep us from taking action, that all play a part in how our days and years turn out.
I truly hope and fervently wish that 2024 is nothing but a good and prosperous year for everyone the world over, but the reality is for most people it will be like any other year….a mixed blessing of good and bad, darkness and light.
Let us all resolve to make a daily commitment to do our best to leave the people we interact with each day better off than we find them, to treat ourselves and each other with as much kindness and gentleness as we can muster, and maybe, just maybe, a year from now we can all reflect back on the truly amazing year that was 2024.
I don’t know about you, but in my house we’ve developed over the years a division of labor when it comes to decorating for Christmas….my wife and kid handle the inside stuff and I handle the outside.
Now, to be fair, we all get input on everything, inside and out, but since I’m the one doing the work, I get final say on the outside, and vice versa.
On that note, the wife and kid put in recently that they have grown disenchanted with the lights I put on our front bushes because they don’t feel they are bright enough and don’t show up well enough.
We’ve had them for at least 5 years and have never been particularly bright, but they get the job done in my opinion, and I’m a firm believer that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
(I’m also cheap and don’t like to spend money on things I don’t have to, even if it’s an inexpensive strand of lights.)
But the whole convo got me thinking, and since I’m always thinking about our country my brain of course made a connection that I thought I’d share.
Christmas lights have continued to improve and evolve over the years from plain white lights, to multicolored lights, to smaller bulbs, from strands where the whole thing went out if one light blew to strands that stay lit even if a few of the bulbs are blown, to LED bulbs, icicle lights, light projectors, pre-lit trees and wreaths, trees that have foot pedals to change the lights and what they do, and the list goes on.
Why have we had all of this advancement in Christmas lights? Because the free market encouraged and allowed for new innovations.
Our democracy has been crying out for the same freedom to innovate, and it’s long past time we make it happen.
Throughout our history one value and outlook that we all shared, regardless of political leanings, was that the end goal was to keep building a more perfect Union, to be better today than we were yesterday, and better tomorrow than we are today.
The goal was never to freeze things as they were, or take us back in time, or accept the old mantra of “well this is how it’s always been done, so that’s how we have to do it”, yet that’s exactly what both parties would have us do.
The only time either one is semi-interested in systemic reforms is when they are the party out of power, but once they win again, they lose interest and would rather focus on keeping power.
When our country was founded the only example upon which to design our system of government was the British system, so our founders took inspiration from them. I cannot fault them for that. They truly didn’t know better.
But now, after almost 250 years, we know of many tried and tested steps we can take to innovate our republic away from a confrontational/zero sum style of elections to a more consensus building and collaborative approach.
Why should we care? Because so many of our societal and governmental problems are going unsolved for decades longer than they need to, and in many cases are symptoms of this root problem…how our system is designed to work.
Right now it’s only working for the two big parties, to maintain their hold on the electorate, while keeping problems alive to campaign on and raise money off of, instead of solving the problems once and for all.
If we can innovate how our leaders are elected, and how they do their work, we will all get a better product at the end of the day, including the entire world.
It’s not about whether America was great, is great now, will be great again, always was great, etc….it’s about “are we maximizing our potential as a nation, as a people, for ourselves and for the planet?”
For the sake of brevity, I’m not going to explain them each because I do so elsewhere on my website, but below is my grown up Christmas list for innovations that would finally start to get us all way better elected officials, and by extension a more perfect Union, across the board.
Expand the US House of Representatives to 1,000 and build a new larger Capitol Building if necessary
Independent Redistricting Commissions to eliminate gerrymandering once and for all
Final Five voting (combining top 5 open primaries with ranked choice voting)
National Popular Vote for President & eliminate the Electoral College
National Presidential Primary Day
Take the money out of politics/public financing of campaigns
Line item veto constitutional amendment
Ease ballot access rules for new parties and independents
So when you’re putting up or taking down or just admiring some lights this holiday season, think about our country’s elections system and system of government.
If we can do better than dim bulbs in the one, surely we can do better than dim bulbs in the other.
And if anyone needs me, I’ll be out at stores looking for new lights to keep my constituency of 2 happy.
I thought I’d try and take a slightly humorous approach this month, because given the state of the world, sometimes you just have to laugh to keep from crying.
With a little over a week before Thanksgiving, if you’re already having anxiety about how to survive the experience with family members who you have deep disagreements with over politics, religion, football, etc, instead of avoiding those topics altogether, if you happen to find conversations turning heated or awkward because you’ve ran out of benign topics like the weather, consider de-escalating the situation with some historical perspective to lighten the mood (I recommend a comical delivery just to be safe).
But before I discuss how to do that, let me explain my thought process.
One of the most regrettable truths about our human existence is that relationships get ruined and damaged from issues of the day that years later looking back no one would argue over.
For example, would anyone today seriously argue in favor of keeping slavery? Or in favor of denying women the right to vote?
Abraham Lincoln used to tell a lot of humorous stories with a message in them, and one that he used to tell is about how one time he saw these two drunken men arguing at a tavern and it turned into a fist fight that spilled outside into the field.
In the course of the fight they each took off their overcoats and threw them on the ground.
At the end of the fight (which didn’t have a clear winner), they both picked up a coat and stumbled away, but without realizing it they had each taken the other man’s coat.
Lincoln used this story to point out how both major parties over time could wind up trading positions on issues, no matter how stridently they used to uphold their old position.
Now let’s say you’re sitting at dinner and your cousin brings up one of today’s hot button issues.
Everyone freezes and the room gets quiet. You notice your aunt giving your cousin a look.
That’s a perfect time to chime in and say something like “instead of talking about that, let’s play a game and try to think of what the most controversial topic was from Thanksgivings past. What do you imagine the most controversial topic was around the Thanksgiving table in the year ____?”
By the way, did you know the first official Thanksgiving was proclaimed by President Lincoln in 1863 so that we all celebrated it at the same time, because from 1621 until 1863 all of the states celebrated it on different days? On that basis I would have to imagine that in 1863 the Thanksgiving proclamation itself was even controversial!
My favorite fact about that first official Thanksgiving was that all along the front lines, while the Union soldiers were celebrating, the Confederate soldiers held their guns out of respect, even after 2.5 years of terrible war to that point.
Whatever happens with your Thanksgiving this year, I hope you remember to keep your cool and appeal to the better angels of your own nature, because 50, 75, or 100 years from now, the issues causing hurt feelings today won’t even be on anyone’s mind. Now pass the gravy, please.
I have heard this phrase over the years and hadn’t heard it again for a while until a few weeks ago when I saw it, and it’s been on my mind as I observe the world around us, our country, and my own existence.
The simple fact is that a lot of times in life we don’t always get to ‘choose our hard’. A lot of times it’s chosen for us, and we have to do the best we can with what we have, and most of us do.
But in a lot of ways in life we DO get to ‘choose our hard’, both personally and as a nation.
For me, I came to the realization a few years ago in my early 40’s that I’m probably going to be sore every day for the rest of my life, so do I want that soreness to be from being out of shape and sedentary, or do I want that soreness to be from exercising?
It’s a daily mental struggle but I’ve chosen the hard of exercising every day, and today as I type this I’m on day 1,306 straight of exercising at least 30 minutes every single day, starting at the end of March 2020 during the pandemic. That’s the hard I’ve chosen.
Another hard I’ve chosen is to be registered to vote as no party affiliation and to go through life as a centrist independent the last 20 years and counting.
Our country has to face a lot of hard choices as well, and as I’ve said before, inaction is a choice as well. The one most prominently on my mind at the moment is the choice of how to deal with mass shootings and gun violence.
Yes it’s hard to choose to deal with gun control issues. Yes it’s hard to deal with electing politicians who will actually work together on this and other issues.
You know what is also hard? Having to continue to live with the daily fear of knowing it could be the last time you see your kid alive when you drop them off at school, or the mall, or the bowling alley or at a restaurant. Yet that seems to be the hard my fellow Americans have chosen.
Is it hard to be engaged as a citizen, to be current on the issues, to keep an open mind, to be involved in political causes and campaigns, especially when you’re working full time, have kids and other obligations taking up all of your free time it seems like? Yep. And for many citizens, just taking the time to vote every year is all they can muster and that’s fine if that’s truly the best they can do.
But you know what’s also hard? Choosing to check out, not care, be self-absorbed, and see your country’s democracy and rule of law develop cracks and falter over time due to apathy on the part of the masses, and maybe one day waking up when its too late to realize that America has become as FDR said about people in faraway lands that had “yielded their democracy”.
The focus the last 3 weeks has been on the House of Representatives and the vacant Speaker of the House position which just finally got filled.
For 3 weeks we did not have a functioning branch of government because of a small minority of extremists.
For 3 weeks the focus was on the GOP for not being able to unify behind a single person for the job. The Democrats kept quiet, playing the seemingly smart play from a partisanship standpoint of allowing the GOP as much rope as they could handle to hang themselves. But was it smart? Was it truly what was best for the country as a whole?
When you come from a mindset like me of putting Country Over Party, what was best for the country during those 3 weeks? Which ‘hard’ should the Democrats have chosen?
The Democrats had several options. First, they could have voted for McCarthy to keep the job and thereby made him beholden to them to keep the job and hopefully bring him back more towards the center and get more bipartisan bills passed and simultaneously make the right wing nutjobs like Gaetz irrelevant.
Second, they could have said they would support a different more centrist or moderate Republican that would do the same thing that they trusted more than McCarthy to work in a bipartisan fashion with both parties to advance legislation.
Now, instead, the GOP took 3 weeks to pick a new Speaker entirely on their own who is arguably more right wing than McCarthy was, less experienced of a legislator and politician, and more beholden to the right wing. How long will Johnson’s Speakership last?
The right wing chose their hard of vacating the Speaker’s chair and then had to deal with the consequences. The Dems chose their hard of not lifting a finger to try and come to a bipartisan solution, in the hopes that they can run on the issue next year and win back the House.
It was a cold blooded, politically calculating, and quite frankly craven choice….why pass legislation today that can help the American people when they can ‘possibly’ get control in 14+ months and ‘possibly’ pass legislation then….the mindset being ‘the American people can wait while they play partisan games’.
You know who can’t wait? The Ukrainians and Israelis who are in need of our financial and military assistance as they fight the forces of evil and terror in the form of Russia and Hamas.
My fellow Americans, there are going to be a lot more hard choices ahead for all of us, both personally and as a nation. I truly hope we all ‘choose our hard’ wisely.
“It’s kind of fun to do the impossible”, Walt Disney once famously said. Whether it is in our daily lives or in the life of our country, there are often circumstances and challenges that seem impossible, sometimes for long stretches of time, until seemingly overnight they are conquered.
In late 1901 after a disappointing attempt at flying, Wilbur Wright dejectedly exclaimed to his brother on the long train ride back from Kitty Hawk North Carolina to Dayton Ohio, “not in a thousand years will man ever fly”. They would achieve it in less than 12 months.
During the period of 1901-1905 when the Wright Brothers were working hard on their flying machine the prevailing narrative in the worldwide press was one of derision and fatigue from all of those who had failed before them, so much so that when they were finally successful and multiple attempts were made to get the attention of the press and the government, it took over a year of continued flights before the world started to sit up and take notice.
Oh, and when they finally did take notice, immediately and simultaneously in several countries around the world people started making attempts to do the same thing following their lead.
So it will be with independent and third party candidates. It will be impossible to do until someone proves it can be done, and then the floodgates will open.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox once wrote “One ship drives east and another west, with the self-same winds that blow, tis the set of the sails and not the gales, which tells us the way to go”. Our nation has always faced and will continue to face strong winds and dark clouds, but as Desmond Tutu said many years ago “every moment in the history of a nation can either be seen as the darkest moment or the brightest moment. Usually both are present. And it is our opportunity, by how we respond, to determine what we make of it.”
What will we make of our times we live in now? Will it be more of the same apathy from the masses while the two party culture wars rage on out of control? Or will good people like yourselves who are tuned into the solutions help spread the word to the apathetic amongst us?
We must never forget that our apathy today was made possible by the hard work, blood, sweat, tears, and treasure of those that came before us. We stand in relative comfort and ease on the shoulders of giants. They made our dreams possible because they made their dreams come true.
Not only can we make our impossible dream happen, we owe it to them and future generations to follow through with the same determination and tenacity that made a contraption of fabric and wood and wire leave the sand for 59 seconds 120+ years ago.
As Wilbur Wright said in 1900, “no bird soars in a calm”. Our American Experiment has been flying into strong headwinds since its inception, and that will continue to be the case. We who envision a future where our politics is not defined by the party we represent but by ideas and solutions to problems must continue to help set the nation’s sails.
If you’ve never seen the Oscar-winning 2001 movie A Beautiful Mind about the real life mathematician John Nash, I encourage you to. He won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1994 and his Nash Equilibrium has had a major impact on how solutions are determined for everything from labor disputes and traffic flows to analyzing hostile situations like wars and arms races.
I do not pretend to be an expert on the topic, but I understand it enough to see that if it were applied to our political situation in America that our democracy would be far better off.
To sum up how I believe it should be applied to politics, instead of every voter thinking purely about what they want, and every politician thinking solely about what they want, if both voters and candidates also thought about what all the other voters want and about what all the other candidates want, and really took time to view the overall forest, we would all get better outcomes in terms of the quality of our candidates, and the quality of our elected leaders.
Here is a video clip from the movie explaining it.
Now, that’s all great, but how do we implement it? We, you and I, need to keep educating and informing our fellow citizens about the nonpartisan voters first movement and all of the many good nonpartisan election reforms that will change the incentive structure for candidates and parties so that they have more interest in working together in good faith and trying to solve problems once and for all.
Until that happens, and until those kinds of reforms are in place, like ranked choice voting, open primaries, final five voting, campaign finance reform, ending gerrymandering, etc, as much as I and many others would love to see third parties and independents run and win elections, they have to be VERY careful and pick their spots where they run, otherwise they will do more harm than good to the cause of creating real competition for the duopoly.
While in principle I do not believe you can spoil a rotten system, in reality every time an independent or third party candidate runs for office, especially for President, the perception is that they are spoilers who take votes away from one of the two parties. And politics perceived is politics achieved.
The best path forward for independents and third party candidates for the time being is to only run in races that are two way races. Are you listening Joe Manchin and No Labels?
Perry Waag 
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