Where are our Mia Loves?

Over at Witterings from Witney, is another article raising questions about direct democracy, one in which the people take forward the nation through active participation in the process in whatever form it takes.  Not that he needs me to say it, but he's absolutely right that:

It is for that reason - and that reason alone - why the active and participative involvement of the people is not just desirable but is, one could suggest, mandatory. It therefore follows that the more distant from the people that decisions are taken, the closer democratised dictatorship becomes

Our participation in taking this nation forward, politically has been questionable.  As a people, we've been asleep on the watch for too long.  I think we've partly been seduced into such a stupour with the decline in our standards in which our ambitions have only been honed to worship the cult of cheap celebrity among other things.  But that's only part of it.  I also see impotent outrage, in the comment sections of news websites in which the people cry out for "someone to do something before it's too late".  There is lots of activity to look externally for someone to restore this nation and take it forward.  There is little activity to take those that claim to represent us to task, to hold them to account and to expel them from their cocoons when they fail in their representation.

Regular readers will know that I often compare what happens (or more to the point what doesn't happen) here with that going off with our cousins in the USA.  I often wonder where our equivalent of the Tea Party movement is - a collective coming together to bring its representatives back to the basic principles of democracy.

There's something else - the counter offering.  Too much of our political scene is run by a professional political class.  These individuals seem to work the corridors of power as though the people and through them, the nation come a very poor second to their own enrichment and advancement. 

Again such people thrive because we let them in two distinct areas.  Firstly we let them by not holding them to account.  Secondly we don't seem to offer alternatives that the the people can identify with.  People who will stand against them with a message of genuinely wanting to put the country back on track.

Again looking back at the US there are people addressing this deficit in their political scene.  Overall the US has woken up and the people are striking back.  I think it has helped that patriotism isn't as dirty a word over there as it is here, but nonetheless people are doing something.

Take Mia Love for example.  Chances are you won't have heard of Mia and her two terms as Mayor of Saratoga Springs in Utah.  Read her story as she looks to stand for Congress in the US.  She potentially has every piece of equipment in the 21st Century grievance kit bag that she could have used to do nothing.  When you read however both Mia and her parents had different ideas, choosing to strive for the life they want and to contribute.  She has offered up a simple message as to what she wants to stand for and to see from government.

Many of those messages apply here.  People like Mia are the counter offer to the managed decline of our nation.  They can exist to take on the status quo by standing against those who do not stand for the benefit of the nation and it's people.

We need people like Mia Love