One small step for democracy

I sincerely have grave doubts about the survival of our so-called democracy or republic, depending on which semantic game you wish to play.

Even the greatest representative governments in history have fallen or have been "tweaked" (like Britain) to make them accommodate the relentless assaults by the privileged on middle and lower income people. The Roman Republic was blown away by Ceasar. Robespierre did a hatchet job on a brief fling with democracy not long after the French Revolution. Alexander Kerensky’s government of the people and by the people in Russia lasted less than a year before Lenin and the Bolsheviks dumped it in the almost bloodless October Revolution of 1917. How about the countless coups that overturned duly elected leaders throughout this century, many of which were the result of covert actions by our own government at the behest of a corporate agenda that had nothing to do with "freedom" or "democracy" and was often in direct opposition to it?

In America we’ve prided ourselves on living by the rules of the oldest document of its kind, the U.S. Constiution, yet it seems what we’ve known and understood as “freedom” and “rights” have only become toothless propaganda slogans. The culprit is not just George W. Bush and his merry band of Neocons. The real culprit is us. For, while the current adminstration ignores and even overturns the system of checks and balances that our nation's founders put in place to protect us from tyranny, the American people seem asleep at the switch, more concerned with the personal lives of celebrities than the actions of their elected officials and the country's slow slide into a dictatorship at the hands of a radical right wing corporate agenda that claims to love Jesus while carrying policies that look more like the worst excesses of the Roman Empire.

First, we must understand that just after the Constitution was adopted the right to vote applied only to free, white male landowners at least 21 years of age. It was only through amendments adopted in later years that women, blacks, non-property owners and 18-year-olds were enfranchised. Women and the under-21 crowd didn’t win the right to vote until the 20th century. Yet while so many have become enfranchised over the years because of an ever-evolving document that is our beloved Constitution, I fear our spoiled, disengaged, well-entertained, lazy and poorly informed modern U.S. society stands of the brink of giving it all up.

Someone once said that a majority in any democratic society, if given enough time, will vote away all their freedoms. One of the icons among the venerable “Founding Fathers” warned us that those who would give up freedom for security deserves neither. The most cynical comment closer to our time was, “If voting really made a difference, they wouldn’t let you do it.”

One of the greatest enemies of a free society are fundamentalist religious zealots, and you can ask intelligent folks who live in Iran, Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia all about it. I fear it’s been happening in America. Our president said he prayed to God, who told him to invade Iraq, killing uncounted numbers of innocent people. Virtally all the Neocons in his entourage are right-wing, fundamentalist born-again Christians, many of whom have no respect for true freedoms, even though they use the word freely. Often these people act as if their beliefs are being attacked or that anyone who stands against them in their path to unlimited power is against all people of faith or even those of one particular faith. Over the last 25 years we’ve managed to allow these types to take over our government and, judging by events in the Middle East over the last three years, may even lead us a self-fulfilling prophecy of Armegeddon- Christians vs. Muslims worldwide. And if Jesus doesn’t come afterward, oops! I guess we got all wrong. What’s a few billion lives? At least gay people didn't get married!

The other great enemy is unchecked power concentrated in too few hands. The brilliant premise of a democracy is that power is shared among all. But they must use it, and do so wisely or else the democracy becomes a charade controlled by a select few with money and power. I'm afraid American elections are often a pointless exercise as the candidate with the most money and who panders most wins the race and goes on to legislate on behalf of his campaign contributors. Those donors are often giving money to promote a corporate agenda that cares not about your job or your family- so long as the company's profits are enough to dazzle Wall Street investors and help the rich get richer while the inflation rate eats away at any cost of living raise you're lucky enough to get- if you still even have a job.

Meanwhile, closer to home, virtually all Republican candidates in West Michigan eagerly pander with their marketing to voters, very simply because it works. Almost all of them have their pictures taken with their families or with an American flag in the background. Nearly all are very loudly pro-life, as if they’re going to do anything significant about the issue that surfaced almost 34 years ago. Nearly all support Second Amendment rights, but don’t talk much, know much or even care about the other nine of the 10 amendments in the Bill of Rights. Almost all of them talk about getting tough on crime, though we now incarcerate more of our citizens than any other civilized country.. Virtually all of them tout their pro-business philosophies and ideas and want more tax cuts, but won’t tell you how government’s going to afford critical services such as police, fire, education, roads, sewer, water, etc. The vast majority support privatizing public services, which is proving to be one of the greatest economic enemies of our republic and slowly outsourcing our economic advantage to third world economies. The American people have spent too long falling for this bait and switch- voting for tax cuts and against gay marriages while allowing their jobs to be outsourced and their government sold to the highest bidder. Meanwhile, the American version of the Taliban keep blaming it all on God-hating Liberals and the Multinational Corporations blame all our troubles on U.S. workers who want a decent wage and affordable health care.

Most of us apparently don’t pay enough attention to figure it out or don’t think it’s important. Though the primary will decide who our next state representative and county commissioners will be, we’ll be lucky to have as many as 30 percent show up at the polls Aug. 8. Why doesn’t someone in government find a way to make it easier for working people to cast their votes? Most likely, it's because the one thing that keeps the zealots and the well-financed in power is by making the process of voting too much for most people to bother with- especially if they keep seeing the same result. Election campaigns are often about confusing the real issues and dragging things so far down in the mud most people want no part of it. Gerrymandering and the corporate media have also made it so the incumbents often get sent back to office. Until we start addressing the real issues and start voting out the bums who got us into this mess, we'll keep on our descent into dictatorship and theocracy. We still have a chance to take back our country, but I fear that our time is running out. August 8 can be a small step toward putting this nation back onto the right path to move forward again. I ask you to do your part.