To the Editor:
I hope that the primary overriding lesson we learn from the election of Scott Brown as the replacement senator from Massachusetts is that the electorate may finally have wised up and decided that, like an uncut melon, an elected official in a new office is an unknown quantity. He looks and acts clean cut, honest and sincere but so does every candidate for office, from class president, sophomore year in high school to country President, USA. Yes, there were numerous issues on which the candidates campaigned, so many that with each candidate came tradeoffs, each offering a different mix and match combination. But there was one constant that came with Brown and not with his opponent: His track record was transparently generic; he was beholden to no one. Unfettered by strong establishment or special interest connections, we hope he’ll represent “us” instead of “them.”
For the past decade or so, D.C. politicians have been a private club unto themselves regardless of party affiliation. Democrats and Republicans alike pandered to vested interest groups willing to pay for their services, including immigrants whose donations were votes in exchange for a subsidized life style, till the corruption mutated from epidemic to endemic and unsustainable levels. Public servants are supposed to be our employees, representing us in whatever office they happen to hold, but they lost that identity; they became independent contractors selling out to whichever customers were willing to pay for their influence. But a trusting electorate chose to follow the path of least resistance and reelect the devil they knew rather than the one they didn’t.
Hopefully, Brown’s election in as corrupt a political environment as exists in our country signals an end to that habit and era. Hopefully, politicians who by their deeds are recognized as professional politicians whose mission is to keep a job rather than be standard bearers for the will of their constituents will not win reelection. The spoiled melons in D.C. need to be picked over and reprocessed into a useful purpose like, compost. This country needs to get back on track, and the only reliable agent capable of putting it there is the People, not a one-dimensional President or a self-serving Congress
Frank Nahigian
Belmont, Mass.
Frank,
I think you got the last administration confused with this administration. The right, including newly elected Brown cares about nothing and no one other then big pharma, big oil, big insurance companies and the ultra wealthy at the expense of the middle class. All politics is about money. It always has been. Brown brings nothing new to the table. The right believes and upholds only the wealthy at the expense of the middle class in hopes that they and they alone will dole it out to the rest of us. The left on the other hand likes to tax the wealthy and use those funds for more social programs such as education, health care etc. All economist agree that a healthy middle class is a healthy country ie: Clinton years. Putting a big divide between the have and the have nots, the Bush years, leads to economic turmoil as is evident today. I never understood why people without money vote Republican. Like asking the fox to watch the hen house.
The point of my story was that we should be voting for non-establishment candidates who vote in Congress according to the will of their constituents rather than according to a party platform. We know that candidates lie, say whatever’s expedient at the moment, in order to get elected. Lying has become an occupational necessity; their election and re-election depends on it. Elected officials, irrespective of party, have more in common with each other than they do with you and me and the rest of the electorate. They are a single, uniform affinity group. The rest of us, who condone their perception of us as their annuity, are another. Your average bear Democrat voter is an idealist who wants to legislate Utopia into existence. He thinks that appropriate legislation can solve all of society’s problems. Your average bear Republican is a realist who believes that, essentially, we live in a jungle and wants to regulate the systems and conditions by which the strong devour the weak in order to allow society to progress efficiently. The politicians of each party play to their respective audiences in order not to have to go out into the jungle and get a real job. When and how it ends we don’t know, but I believe our grandchildren will find out.
I totally agree with you one hundred percent. Very well said. Abris. I loved the line, in your article, “The spoiled melons in D.C. need to be picked over and reprocessed into a useful purpose like, compost. This country needs to get back on track.” I could not have said it better.
ardemis5
Hye Frank, thank you, for speaking the truths that American citizens know, but needed to ‘hear’
again – often. I see morality on its way back into our nation’s governing … the USA, pimples and all, but morally strong… welcome Scott Brown. Manooshag