For those of you out there who still stand in support of your elected federal officials, I have only one question: Why?

This is the America they have brought to reality today:

Education is falling farther behind the rest of the world, including some third world countries. Science and math scores are at all time lows. Education costs are at all time highs. Cuts to student grant and loan programs for higher education leave many out of luck. The average reading comprehension ability among adults is judged to be at a sixth grade level.

Health care has become so expensive that many citizens go without, causing preventive care to be ignored at the peril of national health. Hospitals are overwhelmed with uninsured and illegal immigrants and are closing their doors. Seniors are having to go without vital medicine in the wake of a “new and improved” Medicare prescription benefit. The average bankruptcy is due not to reckless, wanton spending, but to unexpected, catastrophic medical costs.

Energy costs have skyrocketed, but energy providers and others in the energy industry have seen their profits explode. The average person has to choose between filling up the gas tank or buying new clothes for the kids. Home heating bills are even worse. Yet the answer from Congress is not to aggressively explore new energy resources, but to offer tax cuts to the industry as they attempt to gut wilderness areas in the quest for more non-renewable energy sources.

Employment is being sent overseas as companies seek to improve their bottom line at the expense of the people they want to buy their goods. For every middle wage job that leaves, a new Starbucks opens so net job loss is negligible. Net income is going way down though. And as inflation rises along with the federal interest rates, average Americans are being squeezed by the financiers and credit companies. Bankruptcy is also tougher to access for those in real need, but companies can shift their obligations like pensions and health care off on the government while receiving subsidies and bail-outs and tax cuts.

Prisons are expanding in both population and power as more citizens are targeted in the worthless war against pot users. Meanwhile, child rapists and convicted murders are paroled and let loose on an unsuspecting society to make way for the dangerous dopers. We have nicer prison complexes than schoolhouses, which is okay since so many will end up there now that they can’t get a good education or a good job anyhow.

Domestic security is a farce with our unsecured borders, unprotected ports and transportation systems, and concern with taking nail clippers away from the elderly and infants. Regular Americans are kept off of airplanes by a “no-fly” list while we look the other way as violent gang members sneak across the border. But at least the president is spying on average citizens to make sure they aren’t calling terrorists abroad. After all, better to monitor the phones than stop them at the border.

Our environment is being assaulted by corporations who continue to ignore regulations and get away with it. Reducing greenhouse gases is just too darn expensive. Ensuring that water is clean takes too much time, and besides, we soon won’t have any scientists to monitor this stuff anyhow.

On the foreign front, we’ve managed to piss off most of our former allies and made some new, duplicitous ones in the process. The “War on Terror” has been turned into a war on innocent foreign citizens while the real dangerous people are left to plan another battle for another day. And let’s not forget about the fact that we’ve hocked the future of the next two or three generations to foreign countries to pay for all of our misdeeds. The mortgage on America is held by everyone but us, and when the bill comes due, it will be our future generations who are left holding an empty purse.

Throw in an assault on the Constitution by a power hungry president and administration, fueled by a religious ideology and sense of American superiority that does not exist and the very tenets of freedom are on the block.

And what has your congressperson or senator done to prevent any of this? The Republican party in congress has created many of these program policies and championed them through couched as family values or moral certitudes. The Democrats have sat idly by and let it happen. Both want only to remain in power and get richer while the average citizen withers away. They are paper tigers and corrupt pawns of corporate hegemony and religious zealotry and neither will help us regain what used to be a given- namely, American freedom, prosperity, integrity, and pride.

Sure, some politicians are trying to do what is right for America and Americans, and by extension, the other people in this world. But the majority are careerist hacks, bent only on their ability to get power and keep power. They’ve made politics a game of partisan bickering without benefiting the taxpayers who keep them in office. They’ve turned us off on politics by their own ineptitude. They’ve made the job of governing so meaningless that we’ve stopped participating. And now they can do as they will, not to make life in this country better, but to keep the people out of the way.

So I ask you again, Why do you support a system and a politician who would sacrifice you and your children’s future freedom and peace? Is it because you believe the rhetoric you read in the paper or the sound bites you see on TV more than you believe what your own experience tells you? If I kick you in the head and tell you it doesn’t really hurt do you believe that too?

There is another way. In America we are allowed, no, we are required, to choose who will govern us. And when those who are in the chair of power do not do their duty, we are supposed to get rid of them. If the Democrats and the Republicans won’t take this country to a place it should be, a place where our tax dollars fund the people who pay them instead of the bureaucracy that has no common sense, then we must find people who will. We must choose to elect people who are like us. People who suffer the inanity that we all endure and want to change it. People who grow weary of the rhetoric and seek to speak the truth. People who will work towards a common goal of returning America to the land of freedom and fiscal sanity and lawful rationality that it was meant to be.

If the two party system has become so corrupt that it cannot right itself, and I fear that it has become just that corrupt, it is time to move away from it to an era of citizen legislators. Don’t be fooled into thinking that we need two parties to move America forward. They obviously have done nothing but move us backwards. We could do better without them, and our very way of life may require that we do just that.