things can improve

Came across the following, and was struck with wonder at the Experiment which is Democracy and America.
AND the fact that -- Yes, you can make things better -- make a plan and do it.
(Though of course that's tempered with Reality, Timing, Optimum Organization of Circumstances. Takes some genius, some hope, some luck, and some measure of Disgust with old options.)

The founding father-guys had the Odds against them because This Thing -- free country that we all take "for granted" to some degree --
had
not
been
done
before.

A law school teacher wrote this:
-----------------------------------
Enlightenment thinkers like Hobbes and Locke suggested that free men would form governments as a bargain to ensure that one man's freedom did not become another man's tyranny; that they would sacrifice individual license to better preserve their liberty. And building on this concept, political theorists writing before the American Revolution concluded that only a democracy could fulfill the need for both freedom and order -- a form of government in which those who are governed grant their consent, and the laws constraining liberty are uniform, predictable, and transparent, applying equally to the rulers and the ruled.

The Founders were steeped in these theories, and yet they were faced with a discouraging fact: In the history of the world to that point, there were scant examples of functioning democracies, and none that were larger than the city-states of ancient Greece. With thirteen far-flung states and a diverse population of three or four million, an Athenian model of democracy was out of the question, the direct democracy of the New England town meeting unmanageable. A republican form of government, in which the people elected representatives, seemed more promising, but even the most optimistic republicans had assumed that such a system could work only for a geographically compact and homogeneous political community -- a community in which a common culture, a common faith, and a well-developed set of civic virtues on the part of each and every citizen limited contention and strife.

[From THE AUDACITY OF HOPE,

by Barack Obama, Copyright

2006, Crown Publishers,

Random House, Inc., New York.]

-------------------------------------------

Imagine being part of something like that -- setting up a new way for people to live, and participate, and be free, which had not been done, just this way, before. In today's atmosphere, wouldn't the nay-sayers just "beat the idea to death"? Can you imagine if TV and internet had been battering these idealists 24-7, misquoting and maligning?

And -- note the fact that these folks eventually hammered out, and wrote out, agreements on how to do things, set up a government with power balanced among three -- executive, legislative, and judicial, and, by Doing It, set an example.

Setting An Example can be powerfully effective.

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