Why Politics Suck in a Very Short Entry (At Least for Me)

I recently went to a program called "How to Get on the Ballot in NYC" that was one of the rare free programs at the NYC Bar Association. There were people involved with the whole Board of Elections process and how you get yourself on the ballot for anything. My takeaway from it was the precise answers why politics suck & you see a lot of lawyers involved in it. Here goes:

1. The petition process involves not regular attention to detail but an exacting standard just about everyone outside the legal profession would be hopelessly inept at trying to figure out if they didn't already know how to do it or have some political guru on their team already.

2. So this means you need friends in law & politics; your average poor person or lower middle class type shuns those in law with such knowledge (mostly attorneys) as elitist assholes. I wouldn't know with certainty how they view politicians and those working in that area but I'd imagine their views of those people aren't much better. Shunning people will not inspire them to help you.

3. You need trustworthy friends if you're going to run for office. I don't think most people have that. If they do, eventually their charity will come to an end & they will be haphazard even if they are those detail oriented types I mentioned above.

4. MONEY, the biggest problem of them all. You need money to run for public office, maybe pay a campaign staff, advertise, etc.

To get money, you either have to be rich already OR you have to suck up to one of the establishment parties. That requires you becoming their slave once you're in office & being beholden to them to pass legislation that's going to help them, not your constituents.

Add all this together & you get a bunch of representatives who are completely out of touch with the average poor & middle class person. Since statistically speaking, minorities are less likely to be rich, educated and have lawyer/political friends you also get fewer people who know about the experience of minorities and have real qualification to actually help them.

Laws get passed affecting the poor & middle classes that these morons know zip about or perfectly well know about but are slaves to their big money donors (remember, you've got to pay back those campaign contributors somehow).

The ones who know zip about those experiences refuse to educate themselves on the experiences of rape victims, people of color, recipients of public assistance, just about anything they've never lived and will likely never actually experience in their lifetimes. They, as many attorneys, are just too fucking arrogant to say "I need help here. I don't know how to do this/I don't have sufficient information to decide on this. Will you enlighten me?"

Big law firms, where many of these attorneys spring from, don't encourage attorneys to ask for help & even threaten their jobs if they show any hint of weakness or lack of knowledge on something. They aren't okay with you asking for help; they expect you to be an expert on everything even if you're just faking it.

5. So that ties into arrogance, bred from the experience of being an attorney with any financial means to get into public office.

Then, there's 6. Loss of privacy is mandatory to go into public office. This requires a person to be a full on narcissist in order to do the job rather than have any concern for the public trust or helping people vs. donors and the establishment.

Now I've told you why politics sucks. How do we fix it? You tell me. These are the reasons I'm pulling for either Trump or Sanders. They defy this formula in different ways, particularly in not being beholden to big money donors.