BY RUSSELL TURNER
R.I.P. GRASSROOTS
Most of us were brought up to believe that our system of politics was designed to be free of corruption and a forum to share diverse ideas in an open and fair format; our system was originally designed to allow the common citizen to have an equal part in our political process. I often call the common voter a grassroots activist. That whole idea is being shown to be the exception instead of the rule. Just a couple days ago the emails that were leaked to the public showed how the DNC had manipulated the primary system in favor of Hillary Clinton; in reality the supporters of Bernie Sanders were working hard and just wasting their time and energy.
In my writing I like to use analogies to prove my point, the one I am going to use today expresses my feelings on our current political process. Let’s assume that a state wants to have a welter weight boxing tournament. Every county would have a tournament in their county and send their champion to the state capitol for a tournament to determine a state champion. Now assume that in your county you have two boxers, one does all of the roadwork and conditioning to become a great boxer while the other one is too lazy to do the work. When they climb into the ring and the bell sounds, the one that was too lazy to do the work calls in a heavy weight champion to take his place. The heavy weight boxer very quickly defeats the welter weight opponent that did all of the work and conditioning, the lazy boxer raises his arms in victory and he is now the county champion.
We would never allow this kind of practice but, for some perverse reason we allow this to go on every day in the political world. It saddens me the way our citizens allow themselves to be manipulated by the political class. If only our citizens would pay half as much attention to the political process as they do to the sporting world. I remember just a short time ago when there was a big scandal on one football team allegedly under inflating footballs for a championship game, if memory serves me correctly it was called (deflate gate).
Being a Republican it would be nice to think that the corruption in our political system was limited to the Democrat party, but that is not the case. On both sides of the aisle our system has been compromised to where the grassroots activists cannot compete with the money and cronyism that is running rampant. Money and power have become the religion of too many of the people that we elect into public office. Just because someone may have deep pockets does not insure that they are of superior character or have better ideas than someone lower on the social ladder. From what I am seeing, we are seeing the death of the grassroots sector and the growing power of the well connected political class.
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