| | |  Editorials | Opinions 
Time for a Change? Start at Home
 Doug Thompson - Capitol Hill Blue
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April 19, 2010
 |  | Change won’t come from rallying behind lost causes like Ron Paul or participating in staged photo ops for the industry-backed “Tea Party.” Change comes with becoming an active citizen rather than just an “activist.” |  | | |
Angry America out there. People are pissed and those who cash in on opportunity have seized upon that anger to get rich and/or expand their power base.
Sarah Palin has pocketed $12 million so far. A California consulting firm picked up a few million for its political action committee. Politicians embrace the voter anger to get votes and then turn into normal politicians as soon as they polls closed.
Barack Obama is a good example of playing voter dissatisfaction for political gain. He campaigned on “real chang” and then changed from the agent of change to just another political hack as soon as he took the 2008 Presidential election.
Democrats played voter anger in 2006 to take control of Congress, just like the Republican did in 1994 and threaten to do in 2010.
Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown courted voter anger to take Ted Kennedy’s old Senate seat and then turned into just another politician who votes with one eye on the opinion polls back home.
Yeah, people want change, but every time they vote change all they get is a changeling.
It’s the oldest con in politics. Promise voters what they want and then forget them as soon as the election is over.
So voter anger turns both nasty and comical with amateur activists taking to the street dressed up like Uncle Sam or the Statue of Liberty while waving signs filled with hate.
Or they follow failed populists like Ron Paul, the Republican/libertarian who rallied the masses in 2008 and failed to score a pull even one percent of the vote in the GOP primary. He tried once before as the Libertarian candidate and rang up a whopping one-half of one percent.
Change won’t come from rallying behind lost causes like Ron Paul or participating in staged photo ops for the industry-backed “Tea Party.” Change comes with becoming an active citizen rather than just an “activist.”
Change can’t come from painting a Hitler mustache on an image of the President. It can’t come from sending anoymous emails to elected officials or publishing angry screeds on Internet sites while hiding like a coward behind a cute “screen name.”
Change comes from standing up and taking a position and then moving to take serious, positive action on that issue.
How many of you who advocate change participate in local government? How many of you have run for the school board, the town council or the board of supervisors? How many have served on the many volunteers boards and agencies that help make a local or state government run?
Change comes from within and you can’t change from within unless you are part of the system. The governments that most affects the majority of Americans are the town and city councils, the county boards or the citizen boards that help serve those entities. They are the ones who make the final decisions on how federal money is spent in your state and whether or not you have safe bridges, pothole-free roads and a working social services system.
A real “grassroots” operation springs from actions of the locals, the people at ground zero: The many towns, counties and communities that make up this nation. Grassroots cannot be started by consultants in Washington or those with hidden agendas at the national level.
How does this change things at the national level? It can, given time, persistence and patience. A real grassroots operations grows and expands but it cannot work if it starts at the top and works down. It has to spring from the real grassroots — one person at a time.
Former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill once said “all politics is local.”
So is all meaningful change. |
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