bassnation said:
people who get involved with government become comprimised with the reality of politics. everyone knows this.
i hate to be so cynical but i've been on so many protests now which have achieved nothing - yeah they brought people together and it was the right thing to do - but ulitmately those in power ignore them.
the best you can hope for with the current system is to give them a boot up the arse and eject them. i don't buy into this whole "well, we are better than the others" line - its not good enough by half. i want them to define themselves by what they are and have some guts and integrity. if it means something worse for a while then so be it - we'll kick those bastards out too when they lose the plot.
not many solutions in all of that, but i don't feel terribly postive about the state of politics in this country any more.
I am am nearly 50 years old, and I have NEVER felt positive about politics in the UK or in Ireland, where I come from. ...
The political parties are and have always been corrupt - that's the bargain the elites make with those who join the game ..... however as our role in the game is 'voting', and not actual physical engagement on a daily basis, is it not time now to redefine what we as people want, what we do as citizens, not from the current political set-up, but from local and national civic governance and to redefine our roles and responsibilities within that..... to stop leaving it to others to do, mummy, daddy???
Chavez's movement in Venuzeula, Morales in Bolivia started local, and built up over a decade and more into what they are now. That is what it will take here. There are no quick fixes. It requires a life-long committment, a sense of ones life the the stream of generations, a willingness to gift to the future in every way.
Its easy to blame the politicos .... not so easy to get down to the nitty gritty of building what we want .... and the politicos know this, they rely upon this cynicism and the media tend to encourage it too.....
yet as the Power Inquiry has pointed out, millions upon millions of real people WANT to have the involvement ... millions of people are concerned about environment, pollution, war-mongering, racism, profiteering and so on, and realise that the politico's are NOT dealing with these issues.
As regards UK protests, in general most people want to go home for tea, it's only a few hard-core who will stay the course and that needs to change.
For example, when the March against the war with 2 million happened, and yet Blair moved his agenda ahead, we could see the preparations, he got the permissions from parliament and there were no follow-up by the great british public - we could have returned to the streets, we
could have stayed on the streets for days, even weeks untill they backed down ...there was nothing to stop us from doing that .. yet we chose not to (everyone had their own reasons) and now 200,000 civilians in Iraq are dead, 5 times that amount are injured, 10 times that amount are truamatised for life and Iraq is forever polluted with DU ... that's the result of our choice not to engage, not to stay on the streets, and we all need to see that.
Lets encourage all to make that change. Put your cycnicism to one side. It serves only the political elites.