What if House terms were three years - half that of the Senate? That would increase the time between election seasons, but it would also play hob with the whole “off year election” concept (which could be good or bad, I guess).
I really like the idea of limiting campaign seasons to some number of months before the actual election. Perpetual campaigns are really tiring.
@KathyPartdeux, your suggestion about a “timeout” is interesting. It would leave the door open to someone who is generally recognized as being a really good person to have in the government. Also, sign me up if you need a standard bearer when you run for Empress.
It’s also entirely possible that their own beliefs about filial piety levels are working against effective legislation to cover cases where it proves insufficient.
Big spending programs usually take a bit of selling; and it’s a lot harder to sell someone on something that’s an implicit or explicit attack on their self image and/or what they believe to be true. If the electorate believes that they embody at least adequate filial piety and are of a society that does the same pushing the message that, empirically, half the time it’s not good enough to even spare the old people from living in poverty and something more formal needs to be arranged is going to be a thankless job.
Pushing the same proposal to people who don’t believe their treatment of the elderly to be anything special still isn’t going to be trivial; it’s still a lot of money that needs to be obtained from somewhere; but it doesn’t require confronting people with unpleasant truths about what they really are.
I’m thinking of the people who actually believe American healthcare to be exceptionally good by way of example: that belief almost always seems to inspire a reflexive unwillingness to resist even looking at measures that might make it better(because it’s already amazing, they belligerently insist); rather than indicating a keen interest in continual improvement.
Yeah, the Cultural Revolution pretty much put paid to that in China and the Asian Economic Crisis of the late 90s did in that value for the rest of Eastern Asia (government-sanctioned corporate raiding of pension funds) along with demographic inversion (the latter more so in Japan, but most Koreans are in a position where they can’t support their elders).
Whose history is it, anyway? Examining how we commemorate the city’s first Gay Pride March
My fellow activists and I do not understand why the anniversary was celebrated, but the people who worked on the original march have been ignored and excluded.
“Now there has been a grand celebration of the 50th anniversary of the 1972 march, but I see little effort to reach out to the veterans of this historic event, neither organizers nor participants,” said Laurie Barron, a retired social worker who sang at the rally preceding the march. “And it wouldn’t have been all that difficult, as the William Way Community Center and Archives has contact information for many of us. Young LGBTQ folks use phrases like ‘We stand on the shoulders of pioneers,’ but when they have an opportunity to meet us, we’re invisible.”
