Beginning To Awaken

IN 1960, over sixty three percent of eligible voters voted in the Kennedy -Nixon presidential election, which JFK won by a whisker, and probably won only because the democrat party machine in Chicago rigged the vote count there. By 1976, the percentage of eligible voters who voted in the Ford-Carter presidential election fell to fifty three percent. Surveys indicated that a majority of the American people in 1976 believed that the government cared nothing about them, and would do nothing to help them. The assassination of President Kennedy, the disastrous war in Viet Nam, and the Watergate scandal undoubtedly contributed to a decrease in the faith the people had in government. In the nineteen seventies president Carter tried to restore faith in government, and so did Ronald Reagan in teh nineteen eighties, and both did, to a certain extent, but the wars in the middle east in the nineteen nineties and the first decade of the new century, plus economic decline, contributed to more distrust, and seperation, between the American people and their central government. It could very well be that a citizenry disillusioned with politics, and pseudo-intelligent discussions of politics in the entertainment media, grew tired of it all and turned its attention to entertainment, gossip, celebrity fantasy culture, and a million schemes for self help coming at us from all directions. It is as if the corporate rulers of America want to drown the American public in an avalanche of inane banality, to distract the millions of potentially sovereign citizens from their exploited lives, and any thought of doing anything to exercise real political power of any sort. Another reason for the abandonment of the political system might be the fact that people have figured out that it does not work, the wishes of the American people are seldom heard, or implemented. Most American do not want to spend huge sums of money on the military merely to maintain a worldwide empire, which most Americans do not want. And most Americans want relief, of some kind, from their unacceptable health insurance situation. If Obamacare isn't the answer, neither is the system the way it it now, which is the way its been for a long time. What we hav enow has been tried, and it does nto work well enough, and the people atn something done about it. the fact that we have managed to enact even a mildly socialistic health care insurance program is amazing, in the face of corporate power. Maybe, just maybe, the mere fact that the Affordable Care Act was even passed is a sign that the people are beginning to awaken from their decades long political slumber. One can hope.