How To Repair the USA, Part One

This a small installment on moving the country towards its original intent, i.e., a government that serves the people and not the other way around.

First though, I received a humorous email with a story that may or may not be true or accurate, but it made sense to me and is chock full of head nodding truths that might apply to the US Congress and the government as a whole.

The truth is spelled out in the monkey experiment, where 5 monkeys are in a tall cage with a ladder and bananas at the top. As each monkey attempts to climb up to reach the bananas he is hosed down. After a while none try as they have learned something. Each monkey is then replaced, one at a time, and the "experienced" monkeys prevent the new member from climbing. After a while, when all monkeys are replaced with monkeys that were never sprayed, they still prevent any from climbing even though they do not know why.

That is what Group think does.

Such is congress. Group think overrules everything. Trickling in a few new new representatives only continues the political mindset. Replace them all at once and the paradigm will change.

Of course, congresspersons do not start that way. The appearance is that once an idealistic and selfless new congressperson has been among the veterans, they learn the rules of the road. These rules include poll watching, reading legacy media opinion pages, grasping any fault and applying it to the opposition, espousing their service while responsibly (their word) spending other people's earning and justifying it all in name of the common good.

We have an opportunity to replace every Representative every two years and every senator over an 18 year period. So the Senate would be a big glitch in any repair model.

Of course, replacing them all is probably over the top and even though they are politicians, they are probably able reason better than monkeys, although we have little proof of this.