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May 6, 2003
A Pot of Democracy
"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any controlling private power."
-FDR
A dynamic, energized democracy that constantly invigorates its citizenry with the ideals of liberty and justice is like a pot of soup that must constantly be stirred. The more you stir it, the richer it gets. And like a good soup, if you don’t stir it, it starts to burn and it hardens around the edges. All the good stuff sinks to the bottom and all the stock evaporates.
In America, the pot has been left to burn. We may yearn for something better. For a perfect world. With more fulfilling lives. For peace. And yet, the world seems to be crumbling around our ears. We can smell the “soup” burning. Why do we not attend to our “soup,” our democracy" Why, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, did we not release all the energy that heretofore had gone to militarization and redirect it into repairing the damage caused by fifty years of aggression and violence.
The answer is clear. We didn’t keep the “pot” stirring with citizen involvement. We allowed ourselves to go to sleep. Narcotized by media propaganda, numbed by witnessing hundreds of thousands of acts of violence in what passed for entertainment, we, the people, let it go bad. We clung to a paradigm of the world as a threatening place.
With no Soviet Union, our “leaders” were eager to create a new enemy and terrorism fit the bill. Terrorism created by our policies and the policies of our allies. We supported totalitarian regimes. We sold arms to anyone with the money to buy them. We crushed popular democracies throughout the world. Good-bye democracies. Hello Princes, and Generals. And as was inevitable, hello Saddams and Osamas. All the pent up belligerence that our “leaders” had reserved for the Soviets now went towards crushing dissent at home and resistance abroad. And we were left with terrorists at our gates. Terrorists born of desperation. Terrorism largely of our own making. And now we are in a real soup. Maybe the soup can be saved, but maybe we need to throw it out, or at least those responsible for its care.
In America, we are left with fear. Fear of the enemy. We are so afraid of attack from terrorists that we don’t notice the price for our safety has been the giving up of our civil rights. America, it is time to wake up. We give up democracy when we don’t vote. We give up democracy when we don’t keep ourselves informed on issues. We give up democracy when we see the world in black and white. We give up democracy when we choose the lesser of two evils. We give up democracy when we care more about our possessions than the world we leave to our children.
There is one more metaphor that applies to our situation. The frog in boiling water. If you heat the water slowly enough, a frog won’t jump out, and instead, will slowly be cooked. At what stage of cooking are we"
Johnny Peaceseed