Governing Ourselves

WE MUST PREVENT anyone, any single person, from acquiring too much political power.The last thing we want is a dictatorship,tempting though it can be to install one. Even benevolent dictatorships are always on shaky ground, usurpers lurking, ready for revolution. Political power tends to concentrate, people tend to form political factions. A healthy democracy is one in which no single faction controls the government for long, in which the people, by boting, elect their own government at regular intervals, with safeguards against anybody remaining in powr too long, or acquiring too much personal power. Popular participation is the key to democracy. In Australia, voting is mandatory.Maybe it should be in the United States as well, although we can all name people who don't vote, and probably shouldn't, due to lack of intellectual qualififaction. Democraby is hard work, and cumbersone, and it becomes tempting to elevate a dictator or king to replace it.Today there are at least several countries which prove that democracy can work, including, barely, the United States, and Europe, as well as India. With computer an dsocialmedia, democracies should be getting stronger, because the democratizing benefits and influence of the internet should remain available to nearly everyone, as long as everyone demands it, popular democratic internet sovereignty, the many voices of the masses paramount. We the people must take control of society away from teh billionaire corporations, seizing power for ourselves. This will required much greater economic equality throughout society, for which cause the poor, working, and middle classes must unite. The curent distribution fo power, the concentration of pwoer and wealth on planet Earth is untenable, unsustainable. Too much in the hands of too few. We are going to have to share, political power, wealth, resources, all of which have been concentrating in fewer hands for years, and should and must be redistributed, for the greater good of human civilization. Energy might eventually become so cheap that everyone can essentially be wealthy, everybody supplied with more than adequate material resoureces for a happy, healthy life, our historically constant struggle for land and mineral resources which has thus far characterized human history finally, mercifully ended. Regardless, human society will always have to be structured to nurture and maintain the ecological health of the entire planet. As indiiduals, our decision is whether to contribute through our perosnal behavior and utliization fo resources to our own health and that of teh entire planet, our beloved Gaia, whcih we increaslingly realize is as much a living organism as are we.For a dollege asignment I once wrote a short story in which twenty billion people inhabited thenty third century Earth. In my story, social stability adhered. When one considers the volatile, violent instability of twenty twenty six, contemplations of teh future can bcoem unpleasant. The salinet point, the only point is that the near futue and the far human future can go in any number of different ways, some nightmarish, some idlyyic. The future is not written, adn therfore we can help write it now, by our actions. Our calling is to leave our descendants a healthy, vibrant planetary ecosystem, well balanced among all life forms, ours included. To do this we cannot blindly, savagely ravage the Earth for its resoures, but must do as the native Americasn did; take what we need, and leave the rest, as good stewards of mother Earth.