Who Truly Represents Me?

Does a representative who faithfully reads or listens to everything we say to him or her about how we want them to vote truly represent us, even if he knows nothing about the subject I discuss?

I bring this up for a reason.  When reading a book about Bill Clinton once, I noticed his campaign strategy was to do whatever he had to do or say to get into office, regardless of whether it was true, because he and Hillary figured if they didn’t get into office, it didn’t matter what they believed, they would be unable to help anyone anyway!)

So I say, “No, not necessarily.”

And simply because there are differences between men and women, when, say, women are relating concerns to representatives who are men, sometimes that might mean there will be misunderstandings (acted on or not) that can be hard to clear up.

Over my lifetime, I’ve written plenty of letters to both men and women, and I can tell you that almost always, men tend to understand what I have written differently than what I intend for them to understand, in some way.

People can have strong opinions and even the best of intentions of bringing justice to a situation, but I contend that if they have never experienced more than one aspect of whatever-it-is they are trying to bring a solution to (and sometimes even being the opposite gender from me can skew results even if they have also experienced it), they have missing parts in their experience and knowledge bank and cannot fully and adequately represent people who need a solution.

Let’s bring this home.

I’d say there’s an element of misunderstanding that might be true of Hillary Clinton’s Health Care Plan. (No offense, Hillary.)

(And isn’t this the plan Mr. Obama plans to impose on us too?  This may not be just a woman’s perspective or a man’s perspective.)

I have a friend in Massachusetts (yes, she is a law-abiding citizen) who told me this health plan is already in use in her state.  She is one of the poorest of the poor in terms of possessions or wages, but as one of my dearest friends, I’d say she is a gem among rocks.

She is not poor because she does nothing.  She is not trying to bilk the system or society.

If she needs health care, I’ve observed she doesn’t typically go to the doctor even then.  She grew up poor and was not used to getting health care in Brazil, from what I could tell.

She got something in her eye once that caused her a problem for a long, long time.  She never even thought of going to the doctor for help.  Some people just don’t go to the doctor, it seems.

I tried to help her with her taxes after that health care plan became law in Massachusetts, so I know what the plan requires there.

The question is, when every person in Massachusetts is legally required to have health insurance (even the poor) so that it is then a crime if you don’t have health care…and it’s a miracle if you even have enough for food or have a place to stay that is inside a building, then it’s a severe hardship to come up with money for health insurance.

…Health insurance which, by the way, is not cheap.  At least, I don’t know about any health insurance that doesn’t cost someone, somewhere, quite a bit.

The tax forms in Massachusetts require you to list on them the health insurance you had in force for you in the past year, or else prove that you legitimately could not afford it.

It seems to me that there was something on the form that said you had to prove it in court, if you didn’t have any.

Why should it be considered a crime if you are so poor that you can’t afford health insurance?

I’m sure from a wealthy person’s point of view, it is a good plan–that way it “takes care of everybody”.

Since the poor are “less valuable” citizens, it doesn’t matter what kind of problems or humiliation such a plan might cause them.

Based on a comment I heard once, I wonder if there is an underlying assumption that all poor people are “using the system” and taking money from the wealthy that rightfully belongs to them?

I have seen enough of the wealthier side of society to know that they have a lot of expenses, too.  I have no problem with people making a lot of money, especially if it generates jobs or benefits people or society-healthy causes besides themselves in some way, too.

From my perspective, though, I have to say that some of the hardest-working people I know are also among the poorest. Though never learning how to use money well is sometimes a part of the problem, they are often fairly unskilled and just not able to get jobs that pay very well. The jobs they do get often consist of work no one else will do unless they are really, really desperate.

Maybe the wealthy are able to be wealthy simply because others are willing to do the work for them behind the scenes, for much less than they get.

Without the poor or the middle class, the ones at the top may not be able to have all they have.

I somehow see this situation as needing to be give-and-take on both sides, not just one.  It needs to work for both the wealthy and the poor.

While some of the poor do “use the system”, I don’t necessarily think that means all, or nearly all, of the poor are using the system.

Nor do I think that being poor means that somehow God is punishing someone for doing things wrong. (And I do think there is evidence in recent years that some wealthy people have learned to “use the system”, too, in ways that affect all of us.  How is that not robbery, as well?)

Wealth is not necessarily a sign of spiritual health, in my way of thinking, though some preachers would have you think so.  Neither is poverty.

It might just be that you got divorced, and splitting things up between the two of you just meant everyone involved got much less than before.

It might be that your spouse had a disease that required hundreds of thousands of dollars of medical help, and insurance didn’t pay everything, or paid nothing, simply because whatever-it-was was a pre-existing condition.

There have been times I simply couldn’t get work.  No work = no pay, at least on a human scale.

In our area, people are continually getting laid off from the good jobs in the area, and there simply isn’t much work available.

And what if God asks us to do something other than work at a “regular job”?

He does do that sometimes. My financially poor friend in Massachusetts has a God-given gift for ministering to others.  It’s part of her life for Him to point someone out and say “Go here” or “Go there”.  And the ones she helps aren’t always able to pay her anything.  He often provides in other ways that have nothing to do with money.

The poor just might not have enough hours in the day or enough opportunity to earn all the money it would take to pay for their own health care!

In reality, it only makes the poorer that much poorer for them to have to come up with a way to pay for their own insurance on top of everything else.  And they may have a very healthy and necessary pride in needing to do all they can themselves, for themselves.  Just turning them over to the government to pay for that insurance doesn’t really solve the problem, in the end.  Someone else has to pay for it!

Even if Massachusetts supposedly subsidizes healthcare insurance if someone truly cannot afford it–just filling out the tax forms can make you feel like you are a criminal, just because if you don’t have the money to pay for it, you have to prove it in court.

And it appears that the state, then, is the one who has the right to say if someone makes enough to pay for health insurance or not.

The government seems to be getting just a little too invasive, even if they are supposedly “helping” thereby.

The situation of the poor becomes that much more desperate when they have to also pay for their own health care, and they end up having to get help in other ways or neglect to do the legal thing, simply because they have no other choice if they are to survive.  (I’ve seen it happen in other areas.)

I think it may actually create more abuse of the system in the long run (though through no fault of the honest poor, perhaps).  Those who happen to be more careless about following the law may do more to take advantage of it.

The state would not come out ahead, I think, with this plan in place.  They would never be close enough to the problem to ever know that, though, because I daresay not one of the representatives would ever choose to live for a year or two under the kinds of conditions that would tell them exactly what I am saying.

Such a plan backfires in the long run, because the ones making the laws simply don’t understand the consequences if they have never been where the recipients have been or are.  And it can make things worse for the people in leadership in other ways.

Has Hillary ever been so poor that she had to find a way to make that kind of plan work for her and also afford a place to live and enough money to eat? I doubt it!  (Or maybe she has never felt guilt about taking things from the government when she was poor.)

Maybe she was a poor college student at some time in her past.  I know that can be a desperate situation indeed, without help.  (Those of us who have ever been college students without a lot of financial help can attest to that).

But I bet she had at least some training in how to manage money or other means of coping that helped her pull out of it once college was past.

The poor who have always been poor are caught in a cycle they can often never fully escape.  For one thing, it often requires a lifestyle change or retraining in one way or another to fit into a system they did not grow up in.

I think the solution needs to run a little deeper than requiring every person to show evidence that he or she has health insurance of some kind!

And I can also tell you that sometimes the health insurance offered doesn’t do anything of value for the person who has it.

I know that from experience.

Up until now, I have had far more problems with my teeth, muscles, and back than with the rest of my body (one leg is shorter than another, which causes other problems).  My health care needs are generally better taken care of through chiropractors and alternative kinds of health care than through doctors, in my experience.

When I took a job at a local school in order to get health insurance, the only insurance they would pay for, at the number of hours I worked per day, was insurance that required me to pay more in co-pay up front than the services themselves would cost me in the first place.

It was cheaper just to pay for the services myself than it would have cost to submit them to the insurance company so it would pay for them! But then, the insurance company would have paid nothing anyway, because the co-pay was so high.

Come on!  If insurance was the only reason I had the job, I would have been better off without it.

…And because the number of hours I worked was slightly less than the number I needed for full-time coverage, I was not allowed to have dental insurance there, the thing I was really hoping to get in the first place, even if I paid the paltry amount it would have cost them by myself ($2 or $10 or something like that per month).

Something is wrong with this system.  I personally think Hillary’s system would be a financial disaster for the country, if only because the system would find ways to bilk the public in taxes even more.  That would not even consider how it would affect the poor.

Making Assumptions

I’ll see something that is wrong and say, “I have to help those guys!  Someone’s got to do something!”

And then God often gives me an experience that shows me what it’s like for someone on an opposing side.  Almost always, I then realize I spoke or acted too soon.

There are things the other side needs and knows that are important to consider, also.  Things are not always as they seem; it’s not always “greener on the other side of the fence”, just because someone has more money or fame.

Relating this to choosing a representative: I find that I trust most the ones who have had a wide variety of experiences, both pro and con, concerning whatever thing we need a solution for. …Representatives who not only have a lot of book-learning, helpful as that might be, but have also personally gone through a few related things as well. After all, the person writing the books they learned from might not have complete experience or knowledge, either!

There are many things an experienced gardener has learned over time and takes for granted that a new gardener might not even think of. While new gardeners might have great ideas, the experienced gardeners would no doubt be able to see immediately which gardening ideas would probably work and which would not, if they had well-rounded experience.

If I have diabetes, I probably know all the symptoms and medicines and foods I need to eat and all kinds of associated problems that someone else might not.

If there’s going to be legislation providing solutions for diabetics, I would prefer having a representative who has diabetes (or who knows someone who has diabetes well, at least, or a doctor or alternative health practitioner who has successfully worked with diabetics). They’d not only have the necessary knowledge, they’d have the passion to do all they could do to bring about the right kind of help for diabetics everywhere, if they were given the task of representing the rest of the diabetics in the country.

I wonder sometimes if our current representatives actually have adequate experience on all levels.  Though they list what they’ve done and what they’d do for us in our local voter’s pamphlet, my perspective is that anyone can say anything, but that doesn’t necessarily make it true.

Lying is no longer considered a vice by many in our country, and maybe nobody is even checking to see if the blurbs the candidates write is accurate.

I could envision setting up an entirely different system of representation.

When I went to a National Grants seminar recently, I was told about the way government does things to help us when they don’t know the answers for what ails us.

For many things, the government has set up a lot of “loose solutions” to American problems that are difficult for the average person to appropriate.

In the first place, most of us simply don’t know about them. (I’m talking about grants from the government and things like that.)

I think things very well could be dealt with more efficiently in other ways and save the government a lot of money in the process.  (See my post re: fixing the economy.)

For the sake of good communication with the representatives, I think instead of electing them by states according to population, it might work even better to have one man and one woman representative for every special interest group in America.

No lobbying would be allowed at all! If there was another special interest group that needed representation (and if it was for a purpose that was not harmful to our country, like terrorism), they would simply get together as a group and elect someone who would be their best representative for conveying and bringing about what they needed to have happen.  (Perhaps there would be a basic level of screening to make sure that the groups being represented are on-the-level.)

That information would be transmitted to the appropriate committee at the top, and the new representative would be contacted when anything that had to do with that particular special interest came up.  When it did, he or she would be assigned to a team to work out a solution with the other special interest groups that had an interest in that particular matter.

Every representative would have to have a computer (provided by the government if needed) and any necessary software for doing the job, in order to do things this way.

This would save a lot just in travel expenses and any time representatives might lose from work.  Maybe they could even represent us this way and work a full-time job, too!

I’d be all for saving our country money in every way possible, so that every extra dollar could go toward paying off our national debt.  America never even used to require anyone to pay taxes.

Why can’t we find a way to do that again?

Think how much less (say) a family would have to earn to support itself if it didn’t have to pay any taxes!

Maybe even a single could afford to live alone or buy their own house on a smaller salary.

If a special issue came up that needed to be worked out, all the representatives of those groups would be told to arrange a time for doing a teleconference together, and they would keep working on ideas and solutions until they came up with what looked like a win-win situation for everyone. Their decisions could be considered official and receive the necessary funding if it was required, though of course any decision could also be contested if it turned out not to be the right choice for any of the groups. The process could then be done again or new representatives appointed, if that was needed.

Nowadays, we can simply telecommute or have teleconferences from wherever we are, along with other jobs we might do. There would be no need for the government to pay any representative big bucks to be working on solutions and bills that may not even pertain to the people they represented.

We don’t want extra pork in our bills anyway. I think bills should not even be allowed to have “pork” in them. One unencumbered bill at a time!

(How did that ever come to be? We could probably save the country lots of money by changing that situation alone!)

Choosing Leaders

Perhaps the best representative, in my opinion, would be one that not only has a broad range of experience in as many areas as possible but is, percentage-wise, closest to the median of as many special interest groups/trends in the country as possible.

If America is 30% “green”, the candidate should have at least some “green” tendencies, but maybe not go too much overboard.

If 95% of America sees nothing wrong with telling little white lies, then we most definitely should have a representative who also tells little white lies, and he should not be condemned by anyone, anywhere, for doing so, not even by the media, who might also consider it okay to tell little white lies.

If we want a representative, we might need someone who thinks and acts like us in some way, for him to truly get a feel for what we need.

If 50% of America is single, there should be as good a chance for the Governor to be single as married (whatever tradition says about what unnecessary qualifications the Governor or President must have).

If 80% of America is obese, he or she should definitely be, too.

And so on, and so on.

I just think that the person who most closely conforms to America’s “curve” might best understand the needs of America.  Of course, it should be understood that he or she would not be a good candidate without other necessary qualifications for the job, like decisiveness or common sense. Of course.

Payment for Leaders

I see people in leadership most often making decisions based on what works best for them, even if they are in charge of something that’s for the benefit of others.

…You know, like what kind of payscale they should have.  If they are themselves in charge of what they get paid, they might allow themselves as much salary as they wanted to.  And maybe they do.  America has unlimited funds to pay them anyway, right?

What other job in America offers a perk like that, unless you are a business owner with a gift for making lots of money?

And even then, there are expenses business owners have to pay, like wages and taxes, which take more from the bottom line than most employees tend to understand.

Perhaps a different payscale would be appropriate for our representatives.

Not saying they aren’t important people and worthy of all we can give them. But if the representatives we chose were given a salary that was the average of all the salaries of the group they represented, and it was only raised if they managed to help increase the standard of living for their own group, the representatives would (like salespeople do) have even more incentive to do their best for the group they represented in that area.

And they’d have to do it without putting pork in their bills.

(I realize there’s a certain expectation that representatives should be able to get all they can for the particular people they represent. And that’s not always a good thing, either… Does someone else have a better solution?)

Human Resources/Juror System for Picking Leaders

I’ve wondered if a “juror” system (or else something similar to a Human Resources Department in a company) would work for the first stage in picking some kinds of leaders.

I also wonder why certain people run for positions where there is obviously so much abuse in the system. (Maybe that’s also why some candidates run unopposed.)

Do they just want to have the say or power over others? Or do they truly want to make a difference?

And once they are in office, what will they really do for us? The election process itself seems to be an easily-manipulated system, if only because some have no standards of ethics and feel it’s perfectly okay to sign up dead people and convicts to vote in our elections.  Or manage to find a way that any particular person can vote seven times.  Or eleven times.

Or they think that marketing themselves well in the election is the only thing that matters–and whether we actually get the right person for the job does not.

If businesses were run that way, there would be a lot fewer of them in existence today, let me tell you.

Yes, we job-seekers are trained to get past the human resources person’s defenses so we can get a job.  But if someone who hires people does not also know how to pick a good person from the available pool, later on they can find themselves embroiled in lawsuits or find they’ve hired an embezzler, or something worse.

Suppose political leaders could be selected this way:

• a group of possible candidates would be recommended by citizens who knew them (or know of them), recommended for one quality or another they possessed that was on the list of qualifications for that position
• then the process was narrowed down by a specially-selected group trained in hiring people for jobs
• thorough research would be done on their backgrounds to determine that they do, in fact, do what they say or what others say about them)
• the remaining candidates would then be put to the vote of the public.

I think we thereby might come closer to having representatives with the right motives.

If someone is truly a good candidate, probably someone, somewhere, will recommend them for office.

The way it is now, it seems to me certain politicians are allowed to manipulate the campaign system to get elected and then do whatever they please!  How is that fair?

What do you think?

Why can’t we have an annulment system for politicians who don’t even give good evidence of trying to keep the promises they gave in their campaigns or who turn out to be someone they didn’t convey to us during the election?

I realize such a process would need to be fair.

I understand that the way government is set up today, only the representatives who have been elected the longest have much say in doing things for those they represent.

When it is obvious that someone is not right for the job, and both parties agreed on that, perhaps “annulment” could even be done without too much fuss and cost to the taxpayer if we could figure out a way to do it without too much red tape.

Maybe even have something in place to help “freshly-annulled” candidates find jobs more in keeping with their talents.

That would be better for everyone.  Some of us are simply not suited for some jobs. (I know about some of those.)

All of us need to be doing the things we are gifted at doing. We enjoy doing our jobs more, we do a better job, and people enjoy us being in those jobs more.

People with a gift for campaigning or marketing might be much more suited to marketing jobs than to leading a country. (My opinion only.)

Just because you look good and sound as if you have the voice of n angel, it doesn’t necessarily mean you are the best candidate for the job.

As a recent e-mail I got reminded me, Fidel Castro also promised redistribution of wealth, and the thing the country finally became equalized in was hunger and poverty.

Something I know a little more about: While I was living in the Boston area, I was doing telemarketing as part of my job.  While calling pastors to set up presentations for missionaries, I discovered a pastor who sounded more godly than any pastor I’d ever heard. A very spiritually gifted man, too.

Then one Sunday I ended up accompanying (on the piano) a singer who was doing special music for his church. After that Sunday, I decided to attend there. Everything was perfect! I even got to be part of the music team and the prayer team.

A lot of things happened while I was there, but a year or two later, through a big hullabaloo over something that did not need to be major, a family in the church and I discovered he was not what he looked like he was, and I left the church. (The family left first.)

Several years later, I got wind of the fact that he’d left his wife and six kids and married some woman in the congregation.

He’s still a pastor, as far as I know, but he speaks so well that people keep on believing him, somehow.

The person who sounds the best can in fact be the worst. A silver tongue can be covering something that’s not-so-nice.

I would rather know someone’s faults up front and know that, whether I like him or her or not, I can at least live with the results of their actions.

I would rather sit under a pastor that had a sterling character and made all kinds of mistakes in the delivery of his message than one that sounded good and wasn’t.  (Let me clarify–I’m not saying I think that someone with a sterling character can’t also sound good.)

Besides, I’m coming to see the people of any congregation as being as important as the pastor, in deciding whether a church is a good church.  And I am one of them, if I go there. What I do and say, or what other church members do and say, counts for something, too.