Forum Post: Don't march to change opinions, march to change the government

The People's Climate March takes place September 21. There are over 600 organizations supporting the march. Occupy Wall Street is one of them. It is a march to try and change the opinions of the worlds representatives to stop mankind's continuing process of polluting the air and affecting the climate. It is a good and honorable and necessary march.

But it misses the real objective that the 600 organizations have in common: wishing they didn't need to beg their representatives to use the power they gave the representatives for the benefit of the voters. We give them power through our votes and they use that power, our power, against us, against our interests, even against our demands. Time after time we've marched and been jailed, marched and been beaten and killed. Marched and been called names, degraded, labeled the 'lunatic fringe', etc. The powerless don't like being told what to do. Neither do the powerful, even if it comes in the form of the powerless begging them to do the right thing, like give decent wages, let children grow up without working in the coal mines and steel mills of a few generations back. Let the children have schools, the people have decent jobs, let there be hope and opportunity. Sure, they say, and have you sell your soul to the company store, or to the bank for a house you can never call your own. We must make the last march, a march that will result in the people never having to march again. A march not to change the opinions of our rulers, our representatives, but a march to change the very government itself; and change into a Democracy, a real democracy, an Actual Democracy where the people vote directly on the laws under which they will live. Where they are the legislature and debate, argue, cuss and fight, act like gentle-people and act like thugs: do the politics themselves and then do the voting themselves. The irony is that Democracy will have then gone back to its roots: Pericles Funeral oration says the Athenians voted directly on the laws - leaving out that the slaves and women didn't vote, hey, he was a politician. And political thinkers across the generations, like Rousseau, Tom Paine, Jefferson, J.S.Mill, Bertrand Russell, and John Kennedy (Profiles in Courage ) all explicitly say the best and purest form of government is Actual Democracy, the people vote on the laws. And these nmen also agreed that we couldn't put it into practice because we couldn't meet in the center of town and politic, openly debate, then vote. Representative government was the best compromise they could see and it was put into effect. Today we debate and discuss issues together under the umbrella of geo-synchronous satellites with almost instantaneous information transmissions. We tweet, facebook, blog (blog?), email, telephone, and sometimes vote -- on the best entertainers on American Idol, The Voice, X-Factor, America Has Talent, etc. We can politic, openly debate laws, raucously argue, name-call, lie, offer evidence, lie some more, then vote on the laws. We can live in an Actual Democracy and never beg a representative again to quit thinking of his party, his donors, his religion, his pocket book, his PAC, everything but his responsibility to the people. We will know how our 4 trillion dollar budgets get spent and what our future plans are, because we'll make them. The last march will be for Actual Democracy, for citizens voting on the laws. The Association for the Advancement of Actual Democracy is advocating that we start working on putting on that march. See the beginnings at assosactualdemocracy.com. Join it, support it, work for it and quit changing representatives opinions but change the government so there aren't any representatives.