It Might Just Happen

I'm hoping to re-dedicate this blog to a new purpose in the coming months.

Anyone who has been reading for any length of time at all knows my position on our voting system: How I believe that our country would be strengthened considerably by moving to a system of "instantaneous run-off" elections in which a candidate had to take more than 50% of the vote to attain high office (at this point I'm thinking of federal level stuff, I'm not sure enough people pay attention to their local stuff to differentiate between a plurality of candidates).

I believe this would break the two-party stranglehold that the Democrats and the Republicans have on our Federal government. It would give both of them more targets to vie against, so that they couldn't spend all of their time polarizing us as a society into a people whom (at least the vast majority) believe that their party are the forces of good and the other party a batch of corrupt evil people out to destroy the country for their own gain.

The majority party (or at least, the party with the highest number of seats) in most countries that have such a system has a lower percentage of power than the minority party in our Congress.

They say power corrupts, but in our system, when it does, we have only one viable option: Hope that the other guys have sufficiently recovered from THEIR last bout with power and corruption to be better than the current guys. I remember a quote by one of the Republicans about 5 years ago to the effect of "The Democrats took 40 years in the majority to become this corrupt. We've managed to do it in 7." The quote is approximate, and I forget who made it, but it demonstrates my point: We voted the Democrats back into power because the Republicans had become corrupt, but it had only been 12 years since the Democrats LOST power due to their own corruption. Quite a few of the same people are still in Congress from those days.

So here's why I'm hoping over the next weeks or months to rededicate this blog to that purpose: I have recently become re-acquainted with a friend of mine from high school. He has apparently become something of a high powered ad man, and so while I have what I think are good ideas, I have no idea how to get my message out there for people to hear (as evidenced by the double digit (at its peak) readership of this blog).

He and I agree that the first thing we need to do is get a "Million Man March" sort of thing, with roughly half being supporters of the red guys and half supporters of the blue guys, to march on Washington and tell our elected leaders that we're tired of their first priority being their own party's power and their second being their donors, and only a distant third their constituents.

And based on the things he's been doing since High School (while I've been fiddling around with making computers do funky things), he might actually have some idea as to how to create such an event and get people to hear about it.

I'll write more if we actually decide to take this on. It's a huge task, and we both have lives. But we're also both extremely frustrated with the path this country is on, and so we may very well do this.

Finally, I just want to say that if we ever manage to make this a real thing, and we end up doing publicity for it on the late night shows, I want dibs on the Daily Show. ;-)

Liam.