Government—who governs it?

Not many people are sanguine these days about government. It sometimes appears to have taken on a life of its own.

Too often it seems to have become a self-contained system in which a little—or a lot of—corruption is taken for granted. Power politics may have been more outwardly violent in Latin America, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe, but they are simply cousins of the aggressive style that can increasingly be found much closer to home.

We may wonder whether grassroots issues that concern us all—such as education, violence, drugs, and social inequities —will ever change for the better. Yet it has been proved repeatedly that progressive changes come when farsighted individuals catch a vision of how necessary—and how real and practical—moral standpoints and ideals actually are. Vaclav Havel, for example, spent over four years in prison for his anticommunist views. Now the President of Czechoslovakia, he knows firsthand the power of the individual to bring change.

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