"It's messy here, but human."

Democracy seems as if it might be a terrific way to govern the clueless. After centuries of spotty results presuming divine rights and absolute authorities of kings, popes, and potentates, The Founders chiseled out a radical alternative: Hows about we ask The People what they want and focus the government on achieving that? Version 1.0 seems rather crude to our eyes, a couple of centuries and change after the founding of this republic. Version 2.0 seemed better, at least more promising, though some of the new promises faced steep opposition by foot-and knuckle-draggers who struggled with the realities of equal justice for all. They'd apparently become accustomed to unequal justice, where their thumbs weighed more on those revered blind scales of justice.

We're eyes wide open now, I think, ever more closely scrutinizing our intentions against our delivery. We inevitably fall short, though finding that we're still falling short seems a perfectly normal and expected outcome for the avowedly clueless. How can our cluelessness persist through centuries of failing and learning and swearing solemn oaths to our selves and each other? Yesterday's learnings seem to fall into fresh foundation while individuals keep striving, changing what they want, shifting what they intend, ever more closely approximating what they need. The struggle was never intended to end.

We seem today to sit on a cusp of some sorts. The backward-lookers, those striving to maintain what was never more than an illusory old status quo, have marshaled their forces, employing the tactics borrowed from centuries of spotty divine righting and absolute authority-ing, seeking, I suspect, to simplify, maybe to slow down, perhaps to achieve dominion, a dirty word in any democracy. Maintaining a properly clueless society, one well-suited to BIG D Democracy, challenges the best as well as the worst of us. It also challenges those of us who never aspired to become anything more than everyday clueless, rabble, vox populi incarnate. The shifting winds buffer all of us and it seems sometimes from here in the middle of the crowd that some people seem to believe that they know better than the rest of us, and maybe they, like crowned heads before us, do, but knowing better seems beside the point of any democracy, far beside the point of cluelessness.

Some cope with the challenge better than others. I hear arguments on the street, with one side accusing the other of having no clear idea of what to do now, as if that were somehow a damning accusation. It seems to this citizen that our democracy has suffered more under the influence of those who were cock-sure that they knew better than the majority of us. While it might be true that on specific policy topics, the experts do hold a superior understanding, our democracy demands that we fret and fuss our way through until a majority also comes to understand and accept or else we're simply damning ourselves back into some dark age before native cluelessness found a radical way to govern itself.

I feel some days overwhelmed with lies and misconceptions, unable to determine which are deliberate and which simply innocent. Those who run the rumor mills owe their livelihood to the potentates of yore. Those of us mumbling through troubling times still carry the noble flag of cluelessness. We'll hold an election which crowned heads will do everything in their power to manipulate into nothingness. Little do they suspect, let alone know, that a nation of, by, and for the clueless cannot be so cleverly undermined. It's messy here, but human.

©2018 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #CluelessSummer, #PureSchmaltz