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Message: [QUOTE="bags27, post: 2349863, member: 6761"] I fully support your right to say this, and I certainly feel it myself sometimes. But realistically, we live in a nation-state. If we pay taxes, drive on roads that taxes built, take medical care paid for by NIH and therefore taxes, etc, etc, etc, then we own the decisions made by that state. So, we can say what we want to say emotionally, but, unless we do own our country and all its decisions, we don't feel the need to work as hard as possible to influence outcomes. Cicero contemptuously looked down on his fellow Senators who ducked the important decisions and who lived "by their fish ponds." And Diogenes the Cynic could walk around naked, eating garbage, and call himself a man of the universe ([I]cosmopolite[/I]) rather than a man of a particular polis. Today, with the complexities of life, I believe we can't duck our responsibilities to own what our representatives do, however much we are tempted to disown them. [/QUOTE]