As I observe those around me, I cannot help but make the assertion that most Americans are happy, or at least content with the status quo. I have no statistics, no hard data or commissioned polls to back me up, just plain old fashioned horse sense.

And as arrogant and presumptuous as my thesis statement is, it is also entirely right.

You see, history bears me out on this. When people truly desire to make a change, they make it. We have made remarkable, incredible changes when we truly felt that the way things were was the way we would rather not live. I'll cite just a few examples from American history within the past two centuries to bear this out.

In the 1800's, many Americans were upset with slavery as the status quo. It was unconscionable and intolerable that such a practice could exist. When they finally reached the breaking point, they made the changes necessary to free the slaves. Although decades of Jim Crow and "separate but equal" would still serve as barriers in race relations, essentially the actions of those who were finally fed up won out and today race is no barrier to achievement except in the minds of those who would make excuses for their own personal failings.

In the 1930's, we suffered through a horrible depression. Although many of the solutions should have been abandoned once the crisis was eliminated, we made do. We made the necessary changes to survive in spite of extremely trying times.

Less than a decade later, we met one of the most evil men to have ever lived on the battlefields of Europe as it became necessary to stop his madness from taking over the continent, and possibly the world.

In the 1960's, we decided that separate but equal ws not good enough and we set about making the changes necessary to encourage true freedom in the minority communities. Despite the prevailing myth that Republicans stonewalled the Civil Rights movement, the truth is that the support to make the changes necessary came from efforts on both sides of the political aisle. In fact, The Civil Rights Act of 1964 could not have passed without GOP support due to the split among the Democratic Party (yet another in a long list of facts about the DNC that Howard Dean will not tell you).

The fact that neither political party has proposed any serious agenda for change shows that the parties are happy with the direction of American politics. And the fact that we, as American people, have not DEMANDED such an agenda shows that we're basically in agreement with their perspective on the matter.

We COULD progress towards real, meaningful change in American politics. The fact that we WON'T strongly indicates we're not fed up enough to view such change as necessary.