CARLTON FLETCHER: It’s time we held our elected officials accountable

“Never saw it comin’ (Go ahead and lie to me).”

— Johnny Lang

I think this is what’s wrong with the people we elect to political office.

When they decide to run for office, most of them are pretty decent, even idealistic individuals. They — and a close group of friends — think they can help bring about changes that will make our communities, state or nation better.

Then they get into office.

Immediately, they are pressured by leaders of their chosen political party — and the lobbyists who pay for their votes — to toe the line, not to vote for any law, bill or action that does not benefit the party. If they hold out (few, if any, do) and vote their conscious or the way they think their constituents want them to vote, they are ostracized. No committee appointments, no access to the party slave bosses, no support for legislation that might improve the plight of the nation’s downtrodden.

They call it “playing the game.” It’s more like outright blackmail.

But to stay in office — unless you’re a lunatic like Marjorie Taylor Greene who is elected by people who are just like her … i.e. loonies — almost all of the people that we send to the halls of government in Albany, Atlanta and Washington stick to the game plan, refusing to break from the party line or dictates of special-interest bosses. (Greene, again, is an exception because even the Republicans who secretly love and agree with her moronic beliefs wouldn’t touch her with a 10-foot poll, and she is nothing more than a seat-filler, someone whose ideology creeps out even her own party.)

But to stay in office long-term, these elected officials have to give the people who put them in office something. Usually, it’s nothing more than platitudes.

Like the member of the state Senate who said this week he vehemently supports gender identity, open carry and anti-abortion laws because “our primary job is to protect the people of this great state.”

And yet, gun-toting gang members and all manner of unstable gun nuts are taking pot shots at each other and decent, innocent citizens almost at will now. And the very, very, very few transgender and other inclined individuals who don’t fall into this and other like-minded politicians’ cookie-cutter version of what is “right and wrong” are made to feel less than human because they are being targeted for trying to be who they are.

And that staunch anti-abortion stand has already led to a number of medical emergencies and some deaths because … well, we’re 50- and 60-year-old white men, and we are best able to determine what women can and can’t do with their bodies. (This no abortions, period, stance is puzzling, because every poll I’ve seen said Georgians and the overwhelming majority of Americans — and, yes, even the so-called evangelicals and, surprising to me, Catholics — prefer limited abortions. And what kind of ghoul can tell a mother-to-be that neither she nor her child has much of a chance of surviving if that child is carried to term, but, oh well, you have to do it anyway because the old white men in your state said so.)

As I’ve said before, we share a huge part of the blame because we as citizens keep sending these creeps — and others just like them — back into office year after year. Who cares if seniority is so important in a governmental agency if the person holding that seniority is interested in only three things: spreading his or her own beliefs, no matter how outlandish; voting in lock-step with his or her party, or being bought by lobbyists and other influencers?

I’m ashamed of our government as it’s existed the last couple of decades. There is no “for the people” anymore, unless the people you’re talking about are these spineless, gutless wonders who don’t have the courage to drift out of the lanes they’ve been ordered into. And those of you who follow them as blindly as they follow marching orders — whether you call yourself Republican, Democrat or whatever — your blind allegiance is as sickening as theirs.

You want to make our country great again for real? Hold, collectively, your elected officials accountable. And if they lie, cheat and break their campaign promises, work like hell to get them out of office the next time the polls open.