Gerrymandering

Gerrymandering turns congressional districts into salamander shaped territores, makes voting more meaningless than it already is, and utterly corrupts the political process by effectively herding voters, like the sheep they have essentially thus become, into like minded bubbles of passive observers, whether they bothered to vote or not. When it became known that the majority Democrats had gerrymandered the Commomwwealth of Virginia, progressives reacted with joy, purely reflexive. Upon further consideration, they began to fully comprehend the implications and probable consequences of their questionable behavior: a nation of contrived, twisted congressional voting districts, pockets of political uniformity, a deliberate mechanism by which the outcomes of nearly all elections are preordained,and the voters at large are left, in effect, without a voice. Like most of the many varieties of American political corruption, the party in power drawing voting districts to favor one party over another has a long and sordid history. States with uneven geographical shapes are much more vulnerable to it. Even if, say, the Republicans tried to gerrymander Kansas or Nebraska, the result would be voters clustered together in squares and rectangles, with little or no difference between the respective districts in these uniformly conservative states. In Kansas, he conservative candidate will usually win, regardless of party or location. Massachusetts, New York, and California, inherently salamander shaped, will send mostly Democrats to the House of Reprseentatives, no matter the part of the state from which they hale. Everyone claims to detest the corruption of gerrymanering. Nobody to date has done much about it. More alarming still is the willingness with which we the American people, led by our leashes by our power grabbing partisan politicians, meekly submit and accede to the subversion of democracy for political gain, and the passive, inert "enthusiasm" with which the body politic so meekly acquiesces. The founders knew well the potential for seemingly endless forms of corruption in the system they designed, including the subversion of the entire system by a single political party. For this reason, among others, they were almost to a person antithetical to the very existence of political parties, and considered them to be little more than gangs of potential usupers of justice and the will of the people. Just as adulthood is an opportunity to correct the mistakes of our youth, we in the twenty first century have the opportunity to correct the mistakes made by our founding m mothers and fathers, who were as flawed as we,if only we choose to take advantage of it. This we do not seem to be in any particular hurry to do. Conservative by nature, people, as Jefferson pointed out, are much more inclined to sufffer silently under an inefficient, corrputed political system than to take arms agaisnt a sea of troubles, as Shakespeare said. In 1776 the average age of an average Americcan was about nineteen years old. Jefferson reasoned, strangely, that on account of this, a generation therefore consisted of about nineteen years, and that every new generation should write its own constitution and extablish its own system of government, to avoid the undesirable condition of being governed by their ancestors. Instead, we choose, systematically, to indeed by governed by our ancestors. Contray to popular belief, our American constitution is not sacred, inviolable, and perfect. It is a very flawed document, as its authors knew and said, and it should have been updated or replaced years ago. Fortunately, it still isn't too late, assuming we can transcend our silly tendency towards ancestor worship. Enlightened though the founders clearly were, we are no less intelligent than they. Perhaps now is the time to prove it.