Play It Again Sam

When you see damaging cycles repeating themselves every so often in a society, you can say you "see a pattern" in that society.

In individuals we would call such patterns indications of habit, which in some cases is indication of addiction.

I see a pattern in the sections of our government, which effect certain sections of our election cycles, that seem to be patterns of habitual, addictive behaviour.

In the post Keeping Up With The Jones Addiction, we looked at how the addiction to oil permeates into the prescription drug industry, which is a portion of the health care industry.

It was shown that the oil addiction is an addiction, then, which effects everyone.

A pattern I see developing now is one that begins when we attain a stable and prosperous economy. The people seem to become complacent during that time because they are not worrying about losing homes, jobs, health care, college funds, retirement funds, or similar disasters. Things are ok.

Then republicans use false information about economic and other conditions to win an election. Then the republicans screw things up very badly, so they lose power by being voted out of office.

Democrats just voted in then try to fix the damage while the republicans try to keep them from fixing it, even declaring that they want the president to fail.

The damage being repaired is so bad that it can't be fixed completely or fast enough, so democrats are lucky just to prevent a great, nation killing disaster.

The republicans carp and whine about democrats not fixing the national disaster fast enough, even though it was republicans who brought it upon us.

If the democrats do not patch up sufficiently, if enough people are deceived by the republicans, then the republicans can win in the upcoming election cycle, giving them another opportunity to do even further and deeper damage to the nation.

In a recent post Government A La Carte, we discussed the problem of having choices in an election that do not provide a method of solving the problems the people want fixed.

Ending the expensive, stupid wars is not on the table, not on the news, and not on the a la carte election menu.

The fact that we could build 20 Afghanistan schools for the cost of one soldier there for one year, or what we could do with that money in terms of homes, jobs, or health care at home, is considered irrelevant.

The elected government officials see themselves as The Department of Just Us, leaving the suffering populace out of the equation.

It would seem that more choices, in the form of other political parties with ideas that make more sense, would be one way out of the current debilitating systemic addiction.