Democracy And Choices For President

June 7, 2023 Editor, The News-Gazette: An eon ago, in my Intro to American Government class, I used to challenge students who thought they lived in a democracy. We don’t. We live in a constitutional republic (with democratic features).

To emphasize our helplessness and inefficaciousness as “citizens,” consider the following: We get to vote, once every two years, for a representative to the House. We get to vote once every four years for a president. Then, once every six years for a senator. That’s five times at the polls, voting for three human bodies over a period of six years.

Meanwhile, in those six years, for a period of 2,190 days of our lives, our government is organized, managed and run by professional bureaucrats and special interest groups.

Thus, we get five minutes, five times in six years, to pull a lever on a voting machine, while these two groups of “our governors” have three million, 153 thousand, 600 minutes to run our lives.

So much for our “democracy”...

We wouldn’t want to live in a democracy, anyway ... because most of us could not be “in the majority,” often enough, to be satisfied. B ut, we could make better decisions by not sending Joe Biden or Donald Trump back to the White House in ‘24. DON HENKE Goshen