Many history courses offered at Freedom discuss the different types of government styles over thousands of years. We often analyze and criticize these earlier practices and decide what works the best and what does not. When the word “dictator” is brought up in normal conversation, heads turn. The reason behind this is because, in the past, many dictators used force and “brainwashing” to get whatever they wanted, often withholding information from their citizens.
America is a constitutional republic and a representative democracy, meaning that the people select the representatives that make the choices for our country. The system we have established, compared to other parts of the world, is seemingly efficient. Not only are we considered one of the world powers, but crime rates, poverty and disease are relatively small when compared to other countries. However, this is still not a completely perfect system.
Many have heard rumors of China censoring what their citizens can view on the internet. Imagine if our government did this to us. Many would be outraged. What holds our government back from doing this, though? The answer is that they don’t need to. As a whole, most Americans are already extremely uninformed about what is going on in the U.S., as well as in other parts of the world, because life here at home is going well. Corruption could be happening under most people’s noses, and they wouldn’t even notice.
There are endless videos that can be found on the internet that expose how little Americans know about the government. One of the more popular videos asks if you prefer the Affordable Care Act or ObamaCare. Jimmy Kimmel walked around the streets asking random passersby which they preferred. The responses were astonishing. Which do you prefer? If you have an answer to this question, then you are one of these people that needs to become more informed about what is actually going on, considering that ObamaCare is a nickname for the Affordable Care Act.
If Americans aren’t able to distinguish the difference between fact and opinion, our government doesn’t even need to try to keep information from us.
The majority of information we receive is from social media outlets. Though this information is entertaining, most of it is biased. Many news channels lean toward one end of the political spectrum or the other. There should never be just two sides of an issue; there should be endless sides. Nobody is right all of the time, so why should political parties be any different? There are going to be people that belong to a political party who have different opinions than everyone else in that same party. Instead of associating with a party, everyone should take every topic, issue by issue, establish their own viewpoints (independent of what the news tells you to believe) and select the candidate that happens to have similar solutions as you.
In a few hundred years, whether or not America is still a world power, we will look back and criticize our current system. I am afraid that one of our biggest complaints will be that the general public was extremely uninformed and turned a blind eye to what was actually going on, not only in our country, but all over the world.
Flaws are going to be found with how our government works, but in order to improve it, let’s at least become more informed about what is actually going on in regards to our government.