It's like the weather: We all complain but no one does anything

I have been trying not to be so outspoken in my comments to political questions on Facebook.

It isn't that I don't have strong opinions. It isn't that my own views haven't evolved strikingly in recent years. Seven years ago I wrote what I thought would be a good manifesto for a party of the political center. It drew a lot of attention and it left me feeling there might be someplace to go with it.

Then 2008 changed everything. America took a giant step into the 21st century by electing the first president who wasn't a white man, and while a lot of people thought it was wonderful, the election of Barack Obama brought a lot of formerly quiet racists out of the woodwork.

It was actually pretty amazing how often we heard things like "It's the White House, n**ger," or saw pictures of Obama as a jungle dweller or watermelons growing on the White House lawn.

It may surprise some people who know me to hear that I don't think Obama has been a particularly effective president. I think he has tried too hard to compromise with people who aren't willing to give an inch, and I have questioned his priorities at times.

To be fair, though, questioning his effectiveness is sort of like questioning a baseball player' s hitting when each time he goes up to the plate, someone from the opposing team kicks him in the groin.

When you start your first term in the White House with the opposition leader in the Senate saying his only goal for the next four years is to keep you from being re-elected, there's something wrong about that.

Consensus? Not likely

And when you have some of the richest people in America spending tens of millions of dollars to oppose your programs, and disguising the well-financed opposition as a grassroots movement, it makes it difficult to get anything done.

And when it comes to Facebook, what you get is often the less thoughtful, worse informed people speaking the loudest.

You'll get folks parroting whatever they heard from Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh or Fox News.

You don't find truth that way.

I get incredibly frustrated when I hear people saying we should follow the "original intent" of the Founding Fathers, as if a constitution for a coastal nation of three million people would be a perfect fit for a country that has 313 million people and covers most of a continent.

I see people on the right advocating for a return to the way things were 50-100 years ago, and while I doubt they mean a return to racism and sexism, there's no way to do that anyway. Too many good jobs have disappeared for good and we have far too much wealth concentrated in far too few people.

We're never going to have doctors making house calls again, and there's probably never going to be a job for everyone who wants to work.

What we really need is a Constitutional Convention to rework things. Small rural states have far too much power. You could get 51 U.S. senators -- a slim majority -- from states that add up to just 20 percent of the population. Giving such a small number of people a veto over the common good isn't going to result in anything good.

What we really need is to get rid of states.

No, I'm not talking about telling Mississippi to find itself another country to be part of, and I'm not talking about messing with Texas. I think we should change the map and create 50 states of relatively equal population. That might mean the Dakotas would have to hook up with Montana, Wyoming and God knows who else to make one state, and it might mean California would be six different states.

But it would help.

H.L. Mencken wrote in 1922 that the American republic would fall in less than 100 years due to two weaknesses -- ignorance and greed. Thirty years ago, I would have laughed at that. Now I think it may happen.

The thing is, there has to be a reason to keep working at it. There has to be something good we can accomplish. Otherwise, there will be something called America, but it won't be anything like what the founders gave us.

If we're honest, we've already lost a lot of that.

Maybe we can hang onto the rest, but it will take a heck of a lot of work.

A lot more work than just commenting on Facebook.