Stranger things have happened …

Whoever becomes the next President of the United States — barring any kind of surprise third-party conquest — will not be able to repeat again in 2020. One and done.

But who’s next?

At the moment, only 19 percent of Americans “trust the government in Washington to do what is right,” and more than 80 percent are dissatisfied with the way the system works. As the younger generations with greater access to information and transparency get older, that gap will only increase. Business as usual in Washington D.C. is going to change drastically over the next 4 years.

Yet, to do so, something severe has to happen. Is kicking everyone out of Congress even viable? A brilliant thought, but extremely unlikely, considering most spend lifetimes grooming themselves to become officials, all with deep pockets and sketchy connections. But as the biggest seat in the world goes, placing someone there as a symbol of protest would really kick off some sort of revolution.

I’m not talking about an Obama kind of “change,” either. That one word motto of his served as a manipulation tool, an easy way to subconsciously keep him in voters’ heads while they went to the polls. It was a campaign promising change, but was really more of the same. He was a decent leader, arguably, but let’s be honest, he’s sewn from the same thread as Hillary and her husband, and all others before him. We elect a party, not a person.

Just think if Trump wins in November, though … by popular vote. (Push aside all grievances relating to what kind of a human being he is for a second.) What kind of a statement does that send to the people in charge? That our votes actually matter? That we’re pissed? That we’re willing to put one of the most spiteful human beings available to the top office just to alter the course of action? It would be far more historical for Trump to win in November than actually voting in the first woman to the U.S. presidency — which says a lot about where we are now.

But Hillary and Donald aren’t the types of people we want to represent us anymore. That’s an old paradigm falling to the age of the enlightened. America, collectively, sees through the bullshit and is beginning to demand more. That is, after all, what democracy is all about.

It’s about who steps in next for the future. Continuing to vote in career politicians, who purposefully keep their nose clean because it will hurt them in polls taken 20 years from now, isn't what we're after. Frankly, those are the people I trust the least, and you should too. They're the ones who don’t live on the planet everyone else does. ‘Politician’ shouldn’t even be an option as a career, it should be a position one works to through the respect of the people. It should be who we deem to be worthy. Not who figured out how to get there.

And really, what professionals in our culture are out there being the type of person we want to lead a country? The health care industry is shit, the tech industry is shit, the oil and gas and renewable energy industries are shit — they’re all out there bottlenecking competitors and figuring out loopholes to get ahead. Sure, it’s good business, but it’s barely respectable.

Artists are the ones out there spending time telling the stories of the streets, of reality. Teaching and validating.

Can one of them be president?

There’s a precedent for it. Ronald Reagan starred in over 50 films and was the president of the Screen Actor’s Guild long before he became mayor of California, eventually finding himself a seat in the Oval Office. It’s not so unheard of.

Just think: In sixteen, twenty, who knows how many years, the nation’s president could even be someone who in 2014 penned the lyrics, “We killin' 'em for freedom cause they tortured us for boredom / And even if some good ones die, fuck it, the Lord'll sort 'em.” Reading between the lines, Killer Mike makes a great case for change.

Of course it could happen, because we’re becoming less idiotic. Most of us understand that an entertainment moniker doesn’t exemplify the human, or that airing frustrations over a beat doesn’t make someone a devious shithead. We see Killer Mike for who is he, a passionate artist with sensibilities that expand far beyond most other entertainers in the game right now.

Truth. Passion. Honesty. Integrity. Compassion.

They’re what America needs out of a president, or leader of a state, or community organizer. They’re qualities we’ve sought out for hundreds of years through the voting process, even though it eventually became bastardized by corporate interest. Decent qualities are what both the left and the right want. We at least agree on that.

Whether or not someone is able to see things on a spectrum, every day we’re witnessing the future. We all have the power of prediction. But it’s a Rorschach test; everyone sees everything differently. One one end, we can look at the political climate and say it’ll never change, we could throw up our hands and wipe ourselves clean of responsibility. Never bother.

Or we can understand what’s currently going down and look around to honest cultural icons that possess what we need in a future leader. It may not be Killer Mike, but it could be.

Stranger things have happened.