"Robert A. Heinlein - Take back your Government" - читать интересную книгу автора (Heinlein Robert A)

extensive you are certainly entitled to contradict me - but I don't think you will!
If active politics is fairly new to you - if, let us say, you have taken part in
no more than one or two campaigns and have been left disheartened thereby
- I ask that you suspend judgment for the time being.
I am puzzled by persons who take exception to the first proposition and
seem to believe that crookedness is commoner than honesty. I can see how
a citizen too long exposed to a corrupt machine might come to think the
whole world is dishonest, but I am afraid that when I hear a man complain
that everybody is crooked it makes me suspect that he himself is dishonest,
especially if he complains that an honest man can't make a living in his line of
business. I have met crooks, of course, but for every dishonest man I have
met dozens, scores, of men so honest it hurt, both in and out of politics.
Any banker can confirm this. Ask your banker how many good checks
come into the bank for every bad check. The figures will give you a warm
glow of pleasure.
However, the occasional crook will band together with his kind and take
your government away from you if you let him. It is very soothing to the
conscience to tell yourself that, after all, you can't do anything to change the
sorry state of things. It is much easier to sit in your living room, skim the
headlines, and then make bitter remarks about those no-good crooks in the
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city hall, or the state capital, or Washington, and to complain about how they
pay no attention to the welfare of the ordinary citizen (meaning yourself) than
it is to put on your hat, go out in your neighbourhood, and round up a few
votes.
What do you expect for free? Chimes? If you wanted to round up a big
order of yard goods, you wouldn't expect to accomplish it with your feet on
your desk. This is just as important. Or have you forgotten that income tax
form you made out? And your nephew who died at Okinawa because you let
some senile congressman stay in office rather than bother with politics?
Why should the average citizen bother with politics? Why touch the dirty
business? Isn't politics loaded up with crooks you wouldn't want to eat with
and crackpots you wouldn't want to have in your house? "Loaded" is hardly
the word, but you will find plenty of each and they will almost drive you nuts.
Besides that, and worse, your respectable friends - people who wouldn't be
caught dead in a political club - will assume that you are in it for what you can
get out of it They will be very sure of it, for that is the only reason their peanut
heads can imagine!
Then why bother? Why expose yourself to bad companions and snide
remarks simply to make a single-handed attempt to clean the Augean
stables, to bail the ocean, to clear the forest?
Because you are needed. Because the task is not hopeless.
Democracy is normally in perpetual crisis. It requires the same constant,
alert attention to keep it from going to pot that an automobile does when
driven through downtown traffic. If you do not yourself pay attention to the
driving, year in and year out, the crooks, or scoundrels, or nincompoops will
take over the wheel and drive it in a direction you don't fancy, or wreck it
completely.
When you pick yourself up out of the wreckage, you and your wife and
your kids, don't talk about what "They" did to you. You did it, compatriot,