One of the things that I’m tremendously grateful for are the e-mail relationships I’ve developed because of this blog.  When I used to view blogs I always thought most people commented on things and that bloggers got very few e-mails. 

I can’t speak for anyone else but in my case it’s been exactly the opposite and it’s been a real joy in my life (along with the few people I have who regularly comment).  Anyway, here’s an excerpt from one such person (who prefers to remain anonymous) about a post I made a couple days ago…

[begin excerpt]

Hey Tom,

Don’t you think your being a little negative in your [post regarding political change].  I get what you’re saying but I just think it would be more productive to actually suggest changes rather than point out nonsense changes

[end excerpt]

Now this is a topic that I could write pages and pages on but just to make the point here are a few changes I’d like to see, that are fully within President-Elect Obama’s power to do, and that I think would constitute real change.  These were picked because of their cost.  All of these could be implemented for less than 1% of 1% of 1% of the total Federal Budget.    

1.  Hire two people, a Republican and a Democrat and have them work together to write non-biased, paragraph long explanations of each law currently being considered in the congress.  These explanations would be posted on-line and would actually tell people what each law does and what the implications of that law will be.  Most laws are written in a way that obscures a paragraph long idea into a 200 page proposed law.  The reason for that is people in congress have staff members who can summarize each law for them while the public doesn’t.  So the public gives up on trying to track new laws because they don’t have the tolerance to read through 200 pages.

2.   Provide a service that allows people to easily write their representatives and which has a voting mechanism so those in congress can easily see a tally of how their constituency truly feels on issues. 

3.  Host short public debates between Republicans and Democrats on issues facing the nation so the public can hear what each side truly believes and not just the sound bites they hear during elections.

4.  Create and Publicize an open source project for a voting machine that can’t be tampered with so the problems of voting irregularities can actually become a thing of the past.

Again I feel the need to point out the above items would cost virtually nothing in the scheme of things.  To give just one example it would cost 1/6th of what we spent studying the shelf life of Tomatoes in 2007. 

That said (here comes the cynic) I don’t think we’ll see any of the above changes anytime soon.  The problem right now, as I outlined in the post referenced above, is that both parties don’t actually trust the American people at this point.  To most politicians the public has become a group of people you trick into electing you and then ignore until you need to pander to them again. 

Bottom line: Actual change isn’t that hard you just have to want to do it.