Congress returns to work; try to hold your applause

Congress is the institution that’s supposed to protect us from dictatorship, and yet we hate it. Its latest approval rating was 13 percent. A larger percentage of Americans sympathize with the Palestinians than approve of Congress.

I know a few members of Congress, and they are really bright people. But lately, you put too many of them too close and the radioactivity pretty much kills any compromise within a ten-mile radius.

So, Congress will meet for less than three weeks, just long enough to keep the government going until December, and then go back home to try to get re-elected.

During the campaign, you’ll hear a lot about various crises which may require us to bomb countries for their own good.

But issues like immigration reform won’t be touched.

Which I find pretty weird because you look at those crises – Ukraine vs Russia, Israel vs Gaza, the Islamic State versus everybody else – and what they boil down to is various religious and ethnic groups that have been shut out of the political systems that controls their lives.

While at the same time, right here in America, we have 11 million immigrants who work and go to school here and pay taxes here but can’t vote; and then on top of that you have huge numbers of citizens who can vote, but don’t, so that government “by the people” is turning into government by the angriest people, because they’re the only ones ticked off enough to pick up a pencil.

You only have to look around to see where that kind of system leads. So I hope we fix this soon. Because I would really hate to see the day when some superpower decides it has to bomb us for our own good.