Community is more important than leadership.
I debated this point with Senator Barbara Boxer during the 1982 election season.
“It takes three generations to meet the Mayor.”, I tease folks by worrying that our blocs of government are too large and thus unresponsive.
Plato warned that no government should be larger than for citizens you can see.
At CampDemocracy.org I read this snippet,
“In the early 1910’s, our representatives passed Public Law 62-5, limiting the number of representatives to 435. This is less than the Parliament of England during the reign of Henry VIII during the plague years! This problem is, in my opinion, the genesis of all our problems.”
and followed their link to thirty-thousand.org
The House of Representatives was intended — by this nation’s founding fathers — to be a peoples’ house. How many of us would call it that today?
As is shown in this web pamphlet, the House of Representatives has devolved into a virtual oligarchy. Incumbents’ re-election rates currently exceed 95% and their average tenure in office is more than 10 years. Most alarming is the corrupting co-dependence between the elected officials and special interests, especially those that provide campaign financing. Perhaps even more insidious is the growing lack of faith in our government by the general public.
This web pamphlet attempts to demonstrate that the primary underlying cause for these adverse trends is increasingly oversized House districts. In 1804, a member of the House of Representatives represented, on average, 40 thousand citizens. Today, each Representative “represents” over 660 thousand people….
In the early ’80s as a director on Marin County’s Steering Committee for the Future, we built a four day community college conference to encourage citizens to realize that all futures begin where we stand.
We do not wait for edict but build agreement.
Stronger than law, agreement is our good and precious secret.
Whether 1, 10, 1,000, 10,000, our representatives merely manage what we create.
Our democracy are us.
Think Global. Act Local.
Be Personal.
Our Intermodal Yodel:
Network from matrix
And matrix from node,
To coin a modern ode.Web .0