A Worldwide Call for Input:
WHAT IS TO BE DONE?
I have been remiss in a particular obligation: getting back, as promised, to Turbulent Cleric concerning his critically important question, as follows from an excerpt of his November 8th comment posted in response to my article of the same date:
With this in mind, I would like to open the question wide—worldwide—to include any such struggling democracy, while recognizing that the democracies, world round, are being further endangered by the triumphant, trumpet-sounding pseudo-democracies of the US and the UK, and so these latter may very well provide good places to start the discussion, regardless.
I had previously told TC that I was writing a response to his question, but that, as it had quickly reached full-fledged post-length, I would, instead, publish it as a separate article. I still have the original draft saved, but I abandoned it, I thought temporarily, as it was turning into a monster—the post and the question itself. I shall continue to noodle on them both.
However, this is the question that is ever-present in my thoughts, and which is raised, again and again, by people with whom I talk: close friends, family members, new friends met in cafés, bookshops and on the streets, etc.
Roughly speaking, my answer is that we must get, and stay, at the roots of things—radical in the original sense of the word—and not chase the story-of-the-day fed to us via politicians, their official propagandists or the complicit corporate media.
For example, let us not get lost in the question of whether Iraq is becoming a democracy. This was never intended. Why would the US and UK governments seek to bring democracy to Iraq when they undermine it at home? Why would the US and UK bring democracy to Iraq while they quash it the world round? And, then, I talk about the fundamental need for education, that a democracy can only exist when the citizenry—composed of individual citizens—is educated rather than propagandized. That neither the steady-state US nor UK governments are ever going to provide such an education, nor, indeed, do the vast majority of private schools, at the primary, secondary or university level, which are more concerned with granting entry to the establishment than bucking it via truth and critical thought. Therefore, WE must educate, those of us who are more politically aware, who have been fortunate enough to have been in a position to gain insights, who have had the time to explore the nature of things—we must begin to educate, by sharing of ourselves.
This is my rough answer. However, I want to open the question out to the whole of the world, to ask each of you.
WHAT IS TO BE DONE? How, as TC put it so well, can WE develop a form of people power to save us from the false choices we are offered?
Let us not leave the essential work to corrupt politicians operating within corrupt political systems.
Please comment away via the COMMENTS link, below. Or, for those with blogs of your own, feel free to take the conversation to your own sites, and perhaps consider linking back to this originating question. Regardless, invite others to join the discussion so that we may get back to basics, to the fundamentals of true democracy.
*****
If there is dissatisfaction with the status quo, good. If there is ferment, so much the better. If there is restlessness, I am pleased. Then let there be ideas, and hard thought, and hard work. If man feels small, let man make himself bigger.
~Hubert H. Humphrey (1911-78), U.S. Democratic politician, vice president. Speech, 14 Jan. 1966, University of Chicago.
(The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations is licensed from Columbia University Press. Copyright © 1993 by Columbia University Press.)
I agree that our democracies fall far short of what democracy should be. There is a growth of alienation as the political class seems to be both removed and manipulative. […]Turbulent Cleric—who by the way is a Methodist minister in Devon, England—is likely referring, specifically, to the democracies of the United States and the United Kingdom, as these are the primary topics of my article. However, his question is applicable, as perhaps he meant it to be, to endangered democracies wherever they may lie (yes, in both senses).
The big question is how we can develop a form of people power to save us from the false choices we are offered.
With this in mind, I would like to open the question wide—worldwide—to include any such struggling democracy, while recognizing that the democracies, world round, are being further endangered by the triumphant, trumpet-sounding pseudo-democracies of the US and the UK, and so these latter may very well provide good places to start the discussion, regardless.
I had previously told TC that I was writing a response to his question, but that, as it had quickly reached full-fledged post-length, I would, instead, publish it as a separate article. I still have the original draft saved, but I abandoned it, I thought temporarily, as it was turning into a monster—the post and the question itself. I shall continue to noodle on them both.
However, this is the question that is ever-present in my thoughts, and which is raised, again and again, by people with whom I talk: close friends, family members, new friends met in cafés, bookshops and on the streets, etc.
Roughly speaking, my answer is that we must get, and stay, at the roots of things—radical in the original sense of the word—and not chase the story-of-the-day fed to us via politicians, their official propagandists or the complicit corporate media.
For example, let us not get lost in the question of whether Iraq is becoming a democracy. This was never intended. Why would the US and UK governments seek to bring democracy to Iraq when they undermine it at home? Why would the US and UK bring democracy to Iraq while they quash it the world round? And, then, I talk about the fundamental need for education, that a democracy can only exist when the citizenry—composed of individual citizens—is educated rather than propagandized. That neither the steady-state US nor UK governments are ever going to provide such an education, nor, indeed, do the vast majority of private schools, at the primary, secondary or university level, which are more concerned with granting entry to the establishment than bucking it via truth and critical thought. Therefore, WE must educate, those of us who are more politically aware, who have been fortunate enough to have been in a position to gain insights, who have had the time to explore the nature of things—we must begin to educate, by sharing of ourselves.
This is my rough answer. However, I want to open the question out to the whole of the world, to ask each of you.
WHAT IS TO BE DONE? How, as TC put it so well, can WE develop a form of people power to save us from the false choices we are offered?
Let us not leave the essential work to corrupt politicians operating within corrupt political systems.
Please comment away via the COMMENTS link, below. Or, for those with blogs of your own, feel free to take the conversation to your own sites, and perhaps consider linking back to this originating question. Regardless, invite others to join the discussion so that we may get back to basics, to the fundamentals of true democracy.
If there is dissatisfaction with the status quo, good. If there is ferment, so much the better. If there is restlessness, I am pleased. Then let there be ideas, and hard thought, and hard work. If man feels small, let man make himself bigger.
~Hubert H. Humphrey (1911-78), U.S. Democratic politician, vice president. Speech, 14 Jan. 1966, University of Chicago.
(The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations is licensed from Columbia University Press. Copyright © 1993 by Columbia University Press.)
posted by Sean M. Madden at
10:43 AM
)
4 Comments:
I agree with much of your analysis. I regret that most of Us/Uk politics is about which option will drop to its needs first when faced with corporate interests.
Clearly we have a need to develop an alternative culture to set against that currently imposed by our 'rulers.'
I am still a little below par but hope to blog a little on these issues by Monday
Welcome back, TC, and good news that you hope to be blogging again soon.
I was about to doze off when a thought struck which grew out of this dialogue:
"WHAT IS TO BE DONE? How, as TC put it so well, can WE develop a form of people power to save us from the false choices we are offered?"
We outnumber them. We have power in numbers. We need a party that represents our point of view: The People's Party. We articulate a vision, simply and straightforwardly, one that answers the REAL NEEDS of the majority of people as opposed to the SUPPOSED WANTS of the people currently being articulated by Dems and Republicans. (First rule of successful marketing: identify a real need and find a product that meets that need).
Utilize the internet to start the ball rolling.
More after I get some sleep. Hope this makes even an iota of sense come morning.
TUC
It does make sense, TUC, and I thank you for your continuing to think about what needs to be done. Let's keep the discussion alive.
About a year ago, I was thinking along similar lines as what you have put forth, above. However, with another year's worth of observations of, and considerations concerning, the situation at hand, I am now convinced that the system is beyond repair from within, that the structures of power have become so rotten with corruption as to require rebuilding afresh. To play by the rules of the criminally corrupt is to cede the game to bandits whose power lacks legitimacy.
Additionally, political parties have prolonged as they have exacerbated the deterioration of our democracy. They are yet one more in a cache of tools of appropriation which serve to divide and conquer us, one from another and within our own selves, in a battle which serves not the embattled pawns below—us—but the ruling powers gaming from on high. Political parties are a sham. I, therefore, cannot advocate participation in a group-thought politics played along party lines, no matter how old or new the party.
Indeed, we have the numbers. This the corporate-political elite know, and have done well to fortify themselves against.
Consider, with regard to the US (note, however, that my purview is democracies wherever they may lie—active, dormant or nonexistent—for I am by nature a citizen of the world of humanity before I am a citizen by convention of, or birth within, a particular nation-state), the willingness of the Democratic Party to close ranks with the Republicans despite two presidential elections having been stolen from under their noses.
Consider this same willingness to close bipartisan ranks with regard to the deceitful response to 9/11, the thoroughly (and typically) un-American censoring of public thought and speech, the widespread corporate-media collusion for purposes of propagating psychological warfare (or domestic psy-ops) on their fellow citizens, the PATRIOT Act, the perpetual War on Terror, the hiding of truth from the citizenry behind an ominous National Security blanket, and, indeed, the turning inside out of all that the United States is meant to embody.
Our government tortures, disappears and assassinates human beings at will, and imprisons even American citizens without due process of law. In short, our government operates outside of the rule of its own and international law, and does so, by and large, with bipartisan support.
These are undeniable indications that the Democrats, as a so-called opposition party, care far more for holding onto their puny share of power (no matter how relative little its worth outside of personal financial and ego considerations) than they do respecting their constituents or the law of the land, to say nothing of higher considerations for humanity or the world in which we all coexist.
Our forebears instilled within us a near religious regard for the "founding fathers" of our nation. Yet, more than two hundred years down the road of national maturation, it is high time we revisit the unspoken axioms and postulates which lie embedded within the Constitution of the United States. This document was created not by gods nor God but by men, enlightened only insofar as their mortal eyes could then see. See far they did, but not with the near-divine eyesight which we have for too long attributed to them.
With hindsight, we can see their vision, even then, was clouded by considerations concerning slavery, by a paternal attitude which trusted not the people, generally, nor the female half of the population. The Electoral College is a remnant, an historical relic, of their legacy, a legacy of distrust of the people and a documented propensity to rig the game in their own perpetual favor.
As with the days of monarchies past, the days of democracy as designed more than two hundred years ago -- during an age which has been called the Age of Enlightenment, the Age of Reason and the Age of Revolution -- are due to expire, to be replaced in our own time by a collective vision which, while still mortal, will empower individuals to take their rightful participating place in their own governance, as is the inalienable right of all citizens of a democracy, a government not of politicians and their corporate patrons, but one of, for and by the people of a nation.
Indeed, this inalienable right exists not as a bestowal or grant, whether within or without a democratic polity, but by its very inalienability, within us all, worldwide.
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