We can't give up

[Ellen Russak <erussak@aol.com>]

Nina Powers writes: "So many of the arguments being made in politics today, it seems to me, assume the inevitability of "gaming" the system. This is inherently corrupting. It's like the "mordida" in Mexico. So many refuse to do anything unless a tip, i.e. a bribe, changes hands. "La mordida" is a cancer in any culture that practices it, and the unrepentant notion that gaming our political system is not only inevitable but acceptable is a roughly equivalent cancer in our culture."

This is a point I find so compelling - accepting the corrupt status quo as inevitable and unfixible is the same as giving our country away.  It is only through concerted vigilence and effort that any of the positive social reforms have taken place.  

If people in the past had said, "we've never let women vote (or not used slave labor, or exploited labor, or had the starving poor, or let factories pollute, etc., etc.)" and then threw their hands in the air and walked away, we would be a very different and sadder nation.