The election is here. If you haven’t already, get out and vote.
Put aside your excuses and your cynicism.
Forget that democracy, at the detail level, hasn’t worked so well lately.
In the big picture, voting, picking those who write the laws and those who administer them, is the essence of our freedom.
Winston Churchill had it right: democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.
The fruits of democracy
I see the results of voting in my law practice, every day.
BAPCPA, that miserably written and vindictive “reform” to bankruptcy law, is the product of legislators elected by those who bothered to vote.
Those we elected then choose to adopt the the creditor’s picture of the debt strapped consumer- irresponsible and exploitive.
As someone who meets every day with those suffocating in bills they can’t pay, I know that these people are not the careless, self centered, coreless people that a majority of the 2005 Congress believed.
Stuff happened to them: divorce, job loss, illness, bad judgment.
The glory of our legal system is that there is effective, if now pinched, legal relief for their situation. It’s found in the Bankruptcy Code.
But think about the outcome we might have had if the Congress of 2005 was bigger of vision and warmer of heart. Think if those legislators weren’t beholden to money from the financial services industry.
Think what the next Congress could do, if elected by a broader swathe of our populace.
To quote Dr. Seuss:
“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,
Nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”
Dr. Seuss, The Lorax
I’ve voted. Have you?
Image courtesy of fred_v
