Why we need citizens, not cows

Parenting via tv is idiocy in a fantastically exaggarated form. It continutes to propagate the ridiculous notion that parents should be able to continue as if nothing has changed when they have a child. Uhm.. excuse me people, when you have a child, guess what, it's a fucking responsibility. It's not a hobby that you pursue in your spare time in between fucking yoga classes.
that being said.

Our problem as a nation (I will not get into worldwide stuff) is that we are dangerously near a corporatocracy, where ecomomic interests have begun to take over areas of public life and public interest that were never intended to be concerned with the naturally and necessarily private concerns of economics. Everywhere you see the pressure to BUY BUY BUY, and furthermore (as they produce shitty products) to but more when the poorly made products than cease to function a year later. The societal affect of this can best be described as stifling public action. We have become a nation of passive watchers and buyers whose ndividuality is being lost amid the monetary pressure to conform with everyone else and prove our value to others by the products we purchase. We watch life through our TV's and through our internet connections, and worry day to day about our own lives, our own pocketbooks, our own possession's, while forgetting that we as a national body of individuals need to actually act to preserve our rights and value that we each have as human beings. Our politicians no longer practice politics. They practice demagoguery, that is finding the center of mass of the majority and pushing on it in the most emotionally charged bullshit manner possible. They do not appeal to reason or logic. H.L Mencken described a demagogue as " one who will preach doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots." The only idiots being affected today are those who are too lazy or fearful or foolish to keep themselves from being lied to.

And thus through our own negligence and lack of what would classically be described as civic interest, our individuality, that ability to be "your OWN authority and be a good person without someone in a uniform telling you to be" which Kat referenced is being lost.

By the way, the Constitution of this nation, and the ideal upon which it was founded were absolutely based upon the principle that individual people should not be beholden or constrained by a governing influence, indeed that government should be only a tool through which individuals can pursue and work towards goals that they share. It is NOT to be an instrument through which people make personal profit, it is NOT to be anything like the mass media MONSTER that it has become today. The problem is we have allowed it to happen because people are not brave enough or motivated enough, or have the "right stuff" as described by Tom Wolfe to go out there, take a risk and dive into the public world and make a personal difference. Maybe people should wake up and stop letting their tvs tell them what to do.

And a final note.
If I hear another big league politician refer to our government as a democracy I may vomit. Democracy is RULE by the people. news flash people. The Greeks hated democracy as did the founding fathers, because guess what, democracy really translates as RULE BY THE MOB. A mob is the sort of emotionally charged bullshit we have in the political parties right now. A mob is a bunch of people doing something becuase everyone else is doing it, not becuase it happens to be anything close to what they would think of doing themselves. We are intended to be a republic, res publica, return to something common and shared between all people, as in their natural intrinsic value as human beings and their individual potential to take action. Democracy is emotional unreasonable chaos. Republic is reason and logic, discussion and respect, giving value to individual people and their ideas, recognizing that every person has their own unique value that if they take the risk and plunge into the public world to share can bring good to all.
and that in a nutshell is why our society is so FUCKED UP.
How to take action? Mayhap you'll have an idea worth sharing, and you'll tell people about it, and maybe they will agree with you, or enrich your own ideas with theirs, and likewise spread their ideas along with yours, and thus through taking a stand and giving your opinion you've made a difference.
A final quote concerning demagogues:

As George Bernard Shaw said: "But though there is no difference in this respect between the best demagogue and the worst, both of them having to present their cases equally in terms of melodrama, there is all the difference in the world between the statesman who is humbugging the people into allowing him to do the will of God, in whatever disguise it may come to him, and one who is humbugging them into furthering his personal ambition and the commercial interests of the plutocrats who own the newspapers and support him on reciprocal terms."