Friday, October 9, 2015

Pay your parking meters



Friday, October 09, 2015

Politics is described as “an organized” activity, a group of people gathering behind a common cause to achieve power.
This week proved the long-standing assumption that people seeking power often compromise their own beliefs, abandoning principle in order to advance their personal agenda.
On national level, political wizards operate behind the curtains to develop schemes that will lure naïve people into supporting questionable schemes, shaping myths out of papier-mâché so that masses of people will flock to the ballot box on their behalf.
This is no less true locally. Reformers wave flags that draw groups of well-meaning people to their cause, and then when achieving power, cease all pretense at being reformers.
They become the very thing they rallied against, often leaving the landscape littered with the remains of those who once championed their causes.
This is a lesson learned once more this week, leaving a host of disillusioned people to wonder whose cause to rally for, or to abandon the whole field – seeing politics as simply too ruthless and corrupt for ordinary people to engage in.
Wandering through this field of victims, I wonder how we ever get things done, and whether there are ever any good guys and gals when it comes to pursuit of power.
Or do people start out good, and then get perverted by the system they seek to reform?
Power is addictive and seductive. We get there and then we discovered the perks, and then we become the perpetrators of the political crimes we were so bent against when we started our reform movement.
Those who still retain faith or realize they’ve been duped, suddenly give up, abandoning the field of conflict so that no one stands in the way of the power grab.
Honest people feel the hurt deep in the bones, suddenly realizing that they have encountered a cancer for which they have no cure.
They become the walking dead, stumbling around leaderless, seeing everything as corrupt because they flags they followed proved to be the disguise for something they thought they fought again.
It is sad. It is reality. It is the reason why people do not believe in causes after the causes after proved false.
Bob Dylan put it best when he said we can’t trust leaders and must always pay parking meters.

A quarter for your thoughts?

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