The act of electing officials by popular vote is ridiculous. This method is nothing more than what a majority of people happens to think, and so an absurdity could be elected.

Righteous leaders can only be guaranteed if the people themselves are enlightened with the understanding of what is right. Such an election would be unnecessary, then, because everyone would be in agreement and not in a state of confusion of where to be led.

Each person would be a leader, responsibly ordering his own affairs and family and helping others and would not need a bureaucrat to tell him not to throw his Burger King bag out the car window or to not climb in his neighbor's window and rape a sleeping child. But such readily apparent mores, especially the former, seem to escape the general population and so we have a system of penalties, or laws, to keep us on our toes.

Yet the search for truth is lost in the dark systems of the judiciary, as the defense merely wants to show they didn't do it and the prosecutor that they did. The poor defendant, no longer cast in a healing light, plays along with the excitement of being found innocent when he knows he's guilty. Or the prosecutor delights in a judgment of guilty on an innocent person.

The wheels of justice really begin grinding up their victims once they are given over to the jailer. All the failures of the human condition are amplified in this next arena, only slightly tempered by incapable guards and officials. This lack in the proper officiating of the prison leaves a void of command, and so the inmates take over with roaming gangs, acts of violence, cursing, intimidation, and plenty of bodybuilding to properly carry out the previous.

Could it be that when people assemble in a group, bickering, confusion, and failure ensues because the least capable member expresses themselves throughout the whole?

This may be likely and surely that only an individual is able to break free from group failure to realize for herself the proper way to go about things. For even if the group happened by chance to be doing the right movements their understanding and justification for these movements would be missing, and they would just as soon follow Gandhi's recommendations as Hitler's.

If I don't know myself the right way to do things, how can I trust the group to lead me in the right direction?  Therefore, it stands to reason that righteous leaders are appointed by their own right and not by a certain number of ticks on paper.

A simple community accessible vegetable stand - that alone could revive neighborly spirit and cease the waving of our flabby arms at each other through windshield glass.

Spotted delightfully about the countryside during more pleasant months, these produce stands could be year round and offer more food choices, if the siren like call of McDonalds and Wal-mart fell short of our hearing.

Growing a vegetable garden is one of the most simple and fundamental acts of being human and communal. The seeds are readily available (watch out for the genetically modified seeds), the ground is there to till, and your spirit waiting to be raised. Nothing is greater learning for a child or adult, or a prison inmate, to develop that sense of caring and responsibility towards others and oneself.

Start out supplementing your Big Box diet with homegrown veggies and then put a little stand in your front yard brimming with fresh vegetables. They will soon be gone and a few dollars in their stead. Spend the money with other local businesses that create a quality product. This was how towns used to function.

Spread the good word, neighbors may likewise want to grow a batch of tomatoes, sweet potatoes, and collard greens. Where others are involved in common good works, strength and spirit prevail. Raise up fruits, nuts, and animals once your vegetable garden experiment gets off the ground.

On the lonely windswept mega farms there is no caring, no learning, and food manufactured in this way trucked to the Big Box store the customer inevitably regards as foreign and disdainful, as the obese and anorexic among us frighteningly show.

If a neighbor asks if drums of Diazinon, Dibrom, or Di-Syston have been dumped on your produce, you can honestly answer. These questions and concerns will probably lead to organic farming as a better and healthier way to farm.

A larger vegetable garden might spring up which could be commonly taken care of or segregated into plots as is the American custom. The greatest requirement of all for growing an organic vegetable garden is that you don't have to smoke dope, speak in a very soft voice, or be a vegetarian abortionist. You only have to be human.

At the beginning of life there were midwives to assist in birth and a more communal setting, now gone in favor of a sterile impersonal factory setting called a hospital. The naturalness of birth and the beginning of family has now been wrenched from the home to a far away place where unknown officials meddle with instruments, powerful drugs, and indiscriminate advice that has little to do with raising the child meaningfully.

Soon schooling begins within another factory box building that is poorly placed, usually on cleared land devoid of any life, and often far away of unwalkable distance from the family home. The indoor fluorescent lighted cramped classroom separates the pupils from the outdoor knowledge of the land and nature. Impressed on these classroom students is the empty technological thought that man is without meaning apart from what Microsoft, Dow Chemical, and General Electric deem.

With schooling complete, the need for housing apart from parents and family arises and the choices fall to crime riddled lower income areas, outer suburbs far from amenities, and where $200,000 town homes stand glaring across a dividing wall at $300,000 town homes.

Towns never used to be like this in America. The doctor in the large Victorian home used to live down the street from folks in simpler homes, and the two neighbors would share the same streets—conversing perhaps—while walking on the way to the nearby grocery or clothing store. The dynamic differences of human greed that Wal-mart pitted against Nordstrom and Whole Foods changed all of that.

How did this state of ongoing segregation happen? Through the skills of marketing that seek to divide one type of person against another; by exploiting people's desire for self expression against other people. This method of self expression will, in the end, to the degree of its convincing, collapse a society into pure self indulgence and meaninglessness.

Prior times saw marketing and advertising as a simple affair. The magnitude of pervasiveness and sophistication of this same field of artists today is unprecedented and no person of average or lower mind, the bulk of America, can resist the temptations and rewards of advertising's glittering offerings.

Marketers and advertisers have tapped into an open frontier of any result—the subconscious consumer mind. Marketers know the typically sapped and wilted consumer mind is ripe to desire things and therefore easily influenced.

However, humans often tend to enjoy mingling, helping one another, and being considerate towards their neighbors; or generally stated, being amiable—an important detail advertisers overlooked.

In our own meager lives we can revive and understand great people in our search to discover them in context with ourselves. Their succumbing to natural causes or foul deeds never extinguishes the significance of their lives that continues on in the fabric of eternity. Let us peruse a few:

An unknown man stood in front of and blocked an entire line of tanks from moving forward in protest of the China's Communist government. (Time)

During World War II, Sophie Scholl stood up and denounced Hitler and Nazism, quietly saying in court:

"Somebody, after all, had to make a start. What we wrote and said is also believed by many others. They just don't dare express themselves as we did." (The White Rose)

In 1836 a man in Virginia sat down at the table for dinner after a hard day's work of plowing and seeding in the field. His wife lay before him a dish of beans that was undercooked and slightly burned. The man took no notice, continued eating, and thanked his wife while asking her how her day had been.

Sister Leonella Sgorbati made a vow of poverty and non-violence and for 38 years helped the people of Kenya and Somalia. She was shot in the back after Pope Benedict quoted a Medieval Emperor on Islam: (Michellemalkin.com)

"Muhammad brought…that [which] was evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached…." 

At 22, having lost his wife and two children, Andranik Toros Ozanian joined the resistance against the suppression of the Armenian people. At the mountain of Musa Dagh, he led a small group of Armenians, children, men, women, and elderly to defend themselves against a Turkish Army intent on destroying them for the sole reason of existing. (genocide1915.info)

Chief Joseph (Hin-ma-toe-yah-laht-khit) of the Indian tribe Nez Perce, repeatedly tried and failed to peacefully coexist with the disingenuous "white man" and his government. Attacked for not moving to a more desolate reservation, the Nez Perce tribe retreated in brilliant fighting fashion but in the end was separated and scattered over a clear cut landscape. (Juntosociety.com)

"We were like deer. [The white men] were like grizzly bears. We had a small country. Their country was large. We were contented to let things remain as the Great Spirit Chief made them. They were not; and would change the mountains and rivers if they did not suit them." —Chief Joseph

The greatest among us are not within text pages or future remembrance, but within ordinary people who choose to be fully human which history books pick up on from time to time.

"Look, the sun still shines!" Sophie Scholl said as she was led away to her execution (Sophie Scholl - The Final Days)

The U.S. Department of Family Planning has proposed legislation to be approved by the Senate that parents will be required to pass a written and oral parenting test and be pre-qualified before giving birth to a child.

Especially controversial is an additional requirement that all parents of children up to age 18 will be required to pass the parenting skills test.

Lying next to her newest boyfriend, incensed single parent Atherdope Harris seethed, "I'm gonna raise [my] child any way I want to!" after taking a puff on a Newport cigarette.

The freedoms that Atherdope has enjoyed for most of her birthing years may be coming to an end if the parenting legislation passes. If Atherdope produces another child she would not be qualified to parent as a smoker or being unwed and the child would be taken away by social services.

The list of parenting test questions will vary regularly and is a tightly held secret, but some of the disqualifications to parents seeking a new child have been released to the press and include being unmarried, married more than twice, obese, a smoker, and having over 4 children.

Penalties for non compliant parents will range from mandatory educational classes to fines, jail time, and in the worst cases the improperly parented child will be ferreted away in the middle of the night by SWAT equipped Justice Department officers to be adopted by more proper parents.

Germany caters to Islamic terrorists, deporting TWA flight 847 hijacker and murderer Mohammed Ali Hamadi back to the Lebanon gutter in exchange for the release of a German citizen. Now he has rejoined terror group Hezbollah and his despicable kin.

U.S. officials said they "can't rule out" the possibility that Germany deported Hamadi, after he had served 19 years of a life sentence, in exchange for the release of Susanne Osthoff, a German archeologist taken hostage in Iraq and freed four days after Hamadi's deportation. German authorities have denied any such deal was made…. 

On the second day of the [TWA flight 847] hijacking, Hamadi and his accomplices learned that U.S. Navy diver Robert Dean Stethem was on board. Hamadi and his co-conspirators beat Stethem unconscious, then shot him to death and dumped his body on the tarmac of the Beirut airport. The hijackers later escaped.

In 1987, Hamadi was arrested in Frankfurt, Germany, for carrying explosives in his bag at the airport. He was convicted both on that charge and of Stethem's murder and sentenced to life in prison. Late last year he was paroled by the German authorities and deported to Lebanon.

On Dec. 21, 2005, shortly after Hamadi's return to Lebanon, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters: "I think what I can assure anybody who's listening, including Mr. Hamadi, is that we will track him down, we will find him and we will bring him to justice in the United States for what he's done."… (Fox News)

Why "bring him to justice" when swapping terrorists for decent folk is common business practice throughout the Middle East and other parts of the world? Why enforce a universal sense of justice when Germany unofficially plays host to hostage swap meets? It seems like the U.S. is making a stand against cultural relativism and not respecting "cultural differences."

Ransoming or hostage swapping human beings has been practiced for millenia, but the apparent success of a "productive" swap meet validates the practice to continue, causing more misery and bodies to pile up over the "unproductive" swap meets.

Columbia turned into an absolute disaster when the government decided to appease rebels with land, creating a safe haven from which they do business in illegal drugs, and kidnappings, the number one growth industry in Columbia. Some countries, such as the U.S., take an official position of "we do not negotiate with terrorists" when, in secret fact, they recently negotiated with Gaza kidnappers.

Israel doesn't even bother with secrecy, they unashamedly empty out their prisons in exchange for a few Israeli service men held hostage.

The exchange was hailed by the Palestinian Authority and viewed as a national holiday in Lebanon. In Israel, however, the public was deeply divided over the wisdom of the deal. A Ma'ariv survey found 44 percent of Israeli respondents in favor of the German-brokered exchange while 43 percent opposed the deal.

In October 2003, when initial word of an exchange with Hizbollah came out, the prominent posek [halachic decisor] for the Masorti (Conservative) community in Israel, Professor Rabbi David Golinkin, ruled, along with numerous other prominent halachic authorities, that "Exchanging hundreds or thousands of terrorists for one Israeli encourages kidnapping of Israelis, and frees hundreds or thousands of terrorists who will pick up their weapons and attack Israel. In other words, it endangers the public and should not be done."… (Jewish Virtual Library)

Distilling that point further reveals that in practically no case is ransoming or hostage swapping justifiable for the betterment of society. The despicable person released or who money is paid to will inflict greater harm on others, which is more significant than the false relief over the immediate appeasement of terrorists or kidnappers. Admittedly, this is a hard case to press to a grieving wife or husband who would give anything to get their loved one back.

However, with no consequences to hostage taking and instead rewarding them for their bad behavior, there will be no end to what is still perceived as a horrible wrong.

Consequences should be immediate in the form of an escalating military response aimed at the perpetrators and especially the people and countries that support and harbor them. Prior to and after a military response should be a genuine effort to improve their lot in life largely through educative non-monetary assistance.  

To give away money is an easy matter and in any man's power.  But to decide to whom to give it, and how large, and when, and for what purpose and how, is neither in every man's power nor an easy matter. (Aristotle) 

Anticipate charity by preventing poverty; assist the reduced fellow man…by teaching him a trade or by putting him in the way of business so that he may earn an honest livelihood and not be forced to the dreadful alternative of holding out his hand for charity. This is the highest step and summit of charity's golden ladder. (Maimonides)