Today's musings

Today's ban on transgender folk serving in the military is disheartening, and is going to make a lot of people upset. On top of that I witnessed a Lummi woman being poorly represented by her public defender in court today, and wish I had known where to refer her to get proper legal assistance. I should have given her my business card. This is disheartening, and then as I was thinking whether we can make a difference I remembered than in the last 3 years we have had more election reform to true proportional representation in the United States than Germany has had in the previous 150 years. That gives me hope. When we organize, when we mobilize, when we campaign for good people and get good people into office, push for big important initiatives, and vote we can literally replace unfair and corrupt election systems with true proportional representation. That gives me hope. We can change this situation. We can make it better. We did make it better, and there is still a long ways to go. There will always be problems, nothing is ever going to be perfect, but we have to remember where we have come from to give us hope. It is up to us, the voting public to make the future better.

Since the current German system was formed the following has happened in the United States:

1. In 1912 we got the right to directly vote for our Senators for the first time in history.
2. In 2016 Maine became the first state in the United States to implement ranked voting in American history.

Score: America 2, Germany 0.
www.fairvote.org