Let's Reboot The National System!

Look, I'm not a "conspiracy theory" kind of guy, but I really have to wonder what the heck we're doing to ourselves with some of the legislation that's being passed nowadays here in the good old US of A, like the NDAA and the Enemy Expatriation Act, SOPA, PIPA, and others, with and without acronyms. Then we have the whole health care mess, campaign finance shenanigans, etc., etc. You can probably think of a dozen things that are wrong right off the top of your head. And fewer and fewer things seem to be going right.

That got me to thinking: what if we could – peacefully – rewrite our "national operating system" and reboot the whole thing? Bump the Occupy movement up a few hundred notches and rebuild our national source code, taking into account what we know from experience does and doesn't work? Maybe get back to that whole "of the people, by the people, and for the people" concept that Lincoln spoke of in his Gettysburg Address.

Okay, I know this isn't really practical, but it's a fun idea to play with. And who knows? Maybe some little island nation with fifty-three citizens might run with it.

On the other hand…why not? And we don't have to limit the idea to just the United States. Arguably one of the best computer operating systems ever devised is Linux, developed by many people across the world and available in many different flavors. What if we did the same thing to build a core "NationOS" that could be customized to meet particular needs?

"It's too complicated!" Well, it's hard for me to imagine something more intrinsically complicated than a powerful computer operating system like Linux. I'm sure there are, but nothing immediately comes to mind.

"There's no way a bunch of different people could put something like that together." I dunno. Our founding fathers did a great job, but we perverted the system they developed. I sort of look at our Constitution as the first Mac. It wasn't the first democracy or people-centric government, but it was the first that had the bits and pieces that gave America such huge potential.

But we've taken what was a great concept and turned it into a societal analog of Windows Vista, a bloated, inefficient resource hog that many (I daresay most) hated to use.

Note that I said "societal" and not "government" analog. It's easy to blame "the government" for everything, but one of the reasons things are so screwed up now is because of us. Me. You. We the people. The people who are in that sprawling entity known as "the government" aren't any different than the people who aren't. We're all part of the system, we're all part of the problem. And we're all part of the solution.

"Nobody can build a perfect system!" I agree completely. We're human, and we're inherently screwed up in a lot of ways, and anything we create is going to reflect our own flaws. But we can build a better system. We know now a great deal more about every aspect of our society – and this goes for every nation, not just the United States – than did those who founded it. We could build a much better mousetrap.

"We can't modify what's in place. We're stuck with what we have." Really? Every bit of legislation passed by Congress and signed by the president changes our national operating system. And more and more of those changes here in America are bypassing chunks of the "core code" of our Constitution. Would the founding fathers approve? Would they even recognize what our system has become? I don't know. Maybe they wouldn't be surprised at all. Just sad. But we can modify what we have. We do every day. But maybe we should change the focus of those changes, and instead of adding more patches to our national version of Windows Vista, reformat the hard drive and install something new that maybe our forebears would be proud of.

"Well, who's going to decide on what goes in it?" We do. You and me. How the devil did a bunch of people write Linux? Or Joomla? Or any of the other open source products out there? Heck, how did the guys who signed the United States Constitution do it? That couldn't have been easy. But they – both groups, then and now – did it somehow. Maybe they had thumb-wrestling contests to sort out their disagreements. Or maybe they just worked as a group, evaluated each element to determine what they thought would work the best, and tried to set their personal differences aside. I don't know. But the point is that they did it. We can't go back and ask the founding fathers for pointers, but maybe we should ask those Linux guys to see how they did it.

Yeah, I know, it's a stupid idea. Dumb. But how many times have you heard or read something on the news, or something has happened in your life because of "the system," and you just wished there was a Control + Alt + Delete sequence you could push to reboot the whole darn thing?

Many people, it seems to me, have forgotten how powerful we really are. And I don't mean in terms of military strength, or money, or any other typical measure of a nation's power. I'm talking about the power to dream (we just celebrated a holiday in honor of a man who had an incredibly powerful dream, didn't we?), and the power to make those dreams come true. It's not easy, and it doesn't happen overnight. But there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that this nation – let alone our nation, together with others – cannot do if we really set our minds to it.

So, there's my idea. NationOS. Open source. Open platform. Who's ready to write some code??

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