by Susie Fuller

Created on: April 02, 2009

There is an old saying that I'm sure many of you have heard, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me ".

My point is that we elect our government officials. If we are losing faith in them, how could it be anyone's fault but our own. I don't know how is it possible to loose faith in something that you control. We elect our House representatives to two year terms. While we elect our State representatives to six year terms. The key words here are "elect" and "representatives". These are people that we elect, and pay, to represent us. To me that sounds like they are working for us, doing a job that they have been hired to do. It's not a lifelong job either, we give them the opportunity to work for us, and we can take that opportunity away. It's every bit as simple as that.

I think it's human nature to want to believe in people. When a politician looks into the camera and vows to make America a better place for us and our children, we want to believe them. The thing is that so many of them already have a track record of failure that we really can't blame anyone but ourselves when we trust the wrong person with that job.

There are so many different reasons for people to say they have no faith in our government. Whatever reason you may have for saying it, it all boils down to the simple fact that your representatives are letting you down in one way or another. They are either flat out lying to you or they are just simply unable to make good on the promises that they have made. Maybe it's about time for the people to stop standing there listening to promises and start doing some promising of their own. We can make promises just as easy as they can, and we should if we want to fix things. We should promise that they will get one chance, and one chance only, to represent us. If they represent us to our satisfaction we will give then another chance, if they don't they are out on the street.

How many examples would we have to set before they got the picture that we are serious. If you were at work one day and the guy next to you was fired for using the phone for personal reasons, would you turn around and pick up the phone to call a buddy? We may think that our representatives are stupid, but I bet you they would catch on pretty quick if we made an example out of just a few of them.

If our children lie to us we punish them, if our spouse lies we argue, if our friends lies we don't trust them. When our representatives lie to us, we re-elect them. Why are we treating these people so much better than we are treating our family and friends?

It's easy to say it's time for some things to change, and if you ask me, it's just as easy to carry out that change. Our government works for us, we don't work for our government. As the people, we hold all the cards yet we continue to allow them to stack the deck against us. Then we sit around and complain about it.

It is definitely time for some things to change. It is time for us to say to ourselves that when an elected representative of the people breaks a promise, shame on them. When we re-elect them after they have broken that promises, shame on us.

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