I found this entry under government in Frederick Buechner's Whistling in the Dark: A Doubter's Dictionary.
If...governments don't reflect the dreams of the people they govern or serve their wills...you wonder what on earth governments are. Reading the newspapers you get the sense of them as small, irascible groups within each capital---far more of them men than women---who behave in ways that under normal circumstances would land them in the slammer in no time flat. They seem to have a life and purpose of their own quite apart from the lives and purposes of anyone else. They are perpetually locked in desperate struggles with each other that have little to do with the general human struggle to live and let live with as little fuss as possible. It's we ourselves who have given them the power to pull the whole world down on our heads, and yet we seem virtually powerless to stop them...
About the only objection I have to Buechener's lament is that it is too narrow in scope. The same powerlessness we feel toward our democracy we also feel toward those gigantic institutions in the so-called private sector who control our lives in ways that we are powerless to prevent.
I have taught government and politics all my life and in my retirement I wonder if in my teaching I had become something of an apologist for a democracy that has simply proved inadequate to our times and challenges, incapable of bringing the powers that be, inside and outside of government, back to the business at hand of helping us live out our days with as little fuss as possible.
Instead they largely seem interested keeping us on the edge of our seats waiting for the next fresh hell that government should have prevented or prepared us for years ago.
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