The US Oracle

Question asked by my friend Ted with whom we share coffee in the AM.

What’s Up With Our Political System?

Nothing progressive like health care seems to get done.

My response as a political scientist  is that the U.S. political system is broken because of mistrust.  When trust in any relationship, partnership, friendship is broken, the connection is severed and what we call the body politic in governance is rendered dysfunctional. As a result, legislation like health care gets bogged down.

The Green Man’s Response is Nature’s Strategies For Healing A Broken Government.

I asked my Green Man “mythic mentor” about it and this is what he said:

“In nature, there’s basically four responses: fight, flight, adapt, pray and wait for a mutation.”

Given that I see distrust as a bigger and ultimately deeper issue than health insurance, fighting would only exacerbate disrule.  Running away is denial and ultimately that gets you nowhere, unless some mutative miracle happens (or perhaps like a “9/11″ crisis of crippling disease that plagues millions and millions and forces a viable health plan). Sustainability results from the law of “natural selection,” which is the ability to communicate, adapt and create community (workable consensus).

If I were Obama and followed the adaptive way, reach out to the conservatives, independents, liberals, interest groups and the PUBLIC to get policies that can be agreed upon, regardless of ideologies.  Make something work.

Now, that is sweet music to the ears of Green Man.  As he says, “Earth’s nature, which has sustained itself for eons and eons, inspite of frictions and extinctions, searches for what works, no less, no more, and that requires agreement, co-creation, collaboration and continuous adjustments. And it takes time through step-by-step experimentation.

It’s “survival of the most cooperative.”