If a military opponent were to use the poorly named pepper spray upon American servicemen, would not we treat them as having violated conventions against chemical weapons?
If those with money and power get to write the laws so that they neither pay taxes nor suffer criminal penalties for their wrong doings, couldn't we save a lot of time by simply letting people bid for public office, or else have politicians be honest and put themselves up for bid? Perhaps we could take a 10% fee from those bids to pay for the needs of the 99%?
What if you had to have skin in any game whose rules you wanted to lay down? You could not send troops to war unless either you yourself had seen war or your children would be the ones in combat? Or if the war is so important, you get to lead from the front - would we be so ready to use force in other nations?
By the same principal, what of if instead of attacking public schools, we required those who passed laws on public schools to have their own children subject to the rules they impose upon other people's children. Mr. President, imagine if your girls had to sit for the tests imposed by your Department of Education, that their teachers would be judged by those test scores, would you still pay more than $30,000/year for each daughter if their education were getting narrowed to test prep? What if you as a public servant were not allowed to spend more on their education than the jurisdiction in which you reside (which for this discussion would be Washington DC) is able to spend to educate the children of the working class - might you have a different attitude about what our schools really need?
Imagine that a member of Congress could not have health care unavailable to every single American. How long would it take us to get universal coverage, probably single payer?
What if instead of electing Congress we had a national lottery for people to serve, at least for the equivalent of 1/3 of the terms. Thus after a Senator had served 3 terms or a House Member had served 6, the seat would be removed from election and someone would be drawn by lot from the constituency to serve one Senate term or 2 House terms. I wonder, looking at the likes of some in the House and Senate from both sides of the aisle, if we might not get a better quality of legislation? Certainly we might have the needs of ordinary people at least heard in the halls of Congress.
A few thoughts. Not realistic. Just some idle speculation.
Here's one more idle thought - what would this country be like if we really had a democracy, where everyone's vote counted, and everyone participated believing their vote counted.
What if we had a country where the needs and concerns of the bottom 10% mattered half as much as those of the top 1/10 of 1% - see, I'm not greedy.
What if America were really the nation we were taught it is supposed to be?
Or are those of us who still try to inspire deluding our young people?
random, idle thoughts, on a Tuesday night . . . .