It occurred to me our nation has a bad habit of electing lawyers to public office. While our Congress is a legislature, it is one that should be informed by all members of society. Our government should be creating legal language that is accessible and understandable, unshackled and simplistic.
How have we gone from a nation where the entire federal government is created in just a few pages, to a thousand pages plus unread document that is supposed to manage our health care or build a few roads? The answer is that we have filled our government with lawyers and career politicians who emulate them. In short, elect lawyers and you end up with more laws.
If Health Care is truly an issue that needs immediate attention, why have we not elected doctors and nurses to seats in the House and Senate? Why have they not flooded our state legislatures and been elected to positions of authority in our communities?
What does a lawyer or career politician know about medicine? So far the solutions they have presented suggest, not much. Government mandates, incomprehensible systems of oversight, where in the thousands of pages is an understanding of what makes our system right and what makes it wrong? Oddly the one thing a lawyer can provide insight on, what makes new solutions compatible with the Constitution, seems absent from current debate.
Our private sector has been decimated in recent years leaving citizens without work and new ventures without funding. In the wake of Enron, our lawyer class presented more laws. These laws have crippled our economy and destroyed our workers livelihood.
Where in any of the legislation already passed or presented, is an understanding of the mechanics of business, the balance between labor and management, the need for a bottom line or the price of failure? We simply have more laws, not better ideas or informed solutions.
We face War, but where are the soldiers, the Generals, those who have been in battle, those to guide us forward? In a time of multiple fronts and ever increasing threats, what do lawyers know about the true cost of our struggle? They have met our challenges with new mandates for other nations, the slow and useless path of global governance and a razor thin resolve. We have elected lawyers almost exclusively to oversee the work of soldiers. No wonder we have turned our discussion from what it takes to win to what is legally allowed to get by.
As we move to 2010 and 2012, I find myself desiring true change. I seek an end to the legal and career politician dominance of our government. I seek farmers, builders, soldiers, managers, anyone and everyone who holds a perspective different from those currently in power.
This comes with a warning and understanding. The current class has defined what a candidate should look and sound like. All who do not speak in bites of sound, dress in well cut suits and slick back their hundred dollar plus haircuts, are considered the weak ones. Those who are unpolished, those who speak out of turn, those who show moments of true emotion, those who dare defy the frame the media and the lawyers have hung for them, they are considered too stupid to represent us.
The lawyers and the career politicians are the easiest to spot. They speak on cue and fight over the definition of terms rather than the simplicity of solutions. They are, what I often call, beseeched by supercilious intoxication, a drunken arrogance that prizes ridicule as an ultimate weapon.
Like a well-honed radio voice, these members have shed their uniqueness under a blandness that we now accept as the calling card of an everyman. Lost are the accents, the ethnic and cultural colloquialisms that exist in homes across America. These voices are ridiculed on Saturday Night Live, the Daily Show and by pundits. Lost are simple solutions and true debate over ideas because they are considered too stupid to matter. All have been replaced with fights over language, the definition of terms, silly points about obscure legal battles and character attacks that treat public figures as if they are on a witness stand 24/7.
We must change our own expectations and desires because for too long we have sought and supported the wrong kind of candidate. Government has become exclusive to those who govern. We now define leadership as experience, good or bad, in government.
Leadership is not exclusive to one or two fields of labor. Leaders exist all around us and should be informing us on our direction forward. We must look not at the polish or for a paper degree but instead seek leadership and solutions that are beautiful in sound simplicity.
Lawyers have a place in government but government is not a place exclusive for lawyers. Let us seek those from the outside, those who have experience dealing with the problems and pitfalls our nation faces and will face again. Death to the lawyer class as it currently exists. Life to a government of, by and for the people of all occupations.
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