9. The government works for me.

The government works for me. I do not answer to them, they answer to me.

Which why this is our government. We are the government. We control it, it doesn’t control us. We are a democracy.

But again, who is the them. A government is an institution, not a group of people. It is the laws and the policies and the agencies we create for our common welfare. Making the government into our enemy denies our responsibility for having created this mess in the first place. It allows us to claim that this mess is someone else’s fault.

It seems to me that the relationship we have with the government is not so much one of authority in which someone has the right to tell someone else what to do, as it is a kind of mutual accountability. The government can tell me that I have to pay my payroll taxes and if I don’t, I am going to experience consequences. I want to live in a society in which there are clear rules and everyone has to abide by them equally [see #5]. But that means that the government can control me. I have to answer to the government.

On the other hand, I am one of the owners of the system. It serves at my pleasure as I vote for it and pay for it. I am the boss… as is everyone else. We share that title equally, regardless of class, or race, or gender, or ethnicity. I love this country.