Democracy: Self Healing and Correcting Through Courage and Participation

Some days are filled with the suffocating air of discouragement. They challenge our faith and call into question the futility of any kind of action. Their power lay in the inescapable reality that their fears are factual. Human beings can and often do dumb and dangerous things to themselves and one another. Our members are replete with the memories of our own disappointments and regrets. We have all experience the shearing pain of our memories of disillusionment of our heroes and heroines.

Such days can choke the life out of our effort to be optimistic, hopeful and engaged. On those days, instead of inhaling the oxygen of the narratives of both sacred and secular hope,  we pant with the short breaths of cynicism and disbelief. It is hard to function politically, socially and psychologically in such an atmosphere.

Even sadder is that this is the aim and goal of the tyrant, the dictator and the bully. They sow discord, fear and destablize facts.  In so doing, they hope to choke the life out of the citizens of nation so that they can not move to vote, legislate or protest. The bully and the tyrant, would therefore be left alone to impose their will upon people who believe that they can not or should not act because it is futile and fraught with the inevitable failure of lapsing into humanity’s worse binary nightmare of winners who gloat, and losers who exact a price on their enemies.

There are those who thrive in this atmosphere. They enjoy the sport of politics. They enjoy the exertion of humiliating those with whom they do not agree. Their lips drip with the spittle of the insult and their skins glisten with the sweat of the sustained effort of fighting to win their point and exert their will regardless of the affect or import of the outcome to the whole. Right is might and politics is an end and means to itself. Such a dynamic ensures that people retreat to their identities of teams, clans or silos which only serve to magnify their desire to compete. This divisiveness  produce the stupefying heat of selfishness.

In such an atmosphere democracy dies because people are paralyze. They simply can’t move, organize or engage in the normal discourse of compromise. Sometimes people and groups do summon their energy for an eruption of pain and anger through riots and acts of violence. This is an effort to breath but, alas, only adds to the combative atmosphere that steals hope and frustrates progress.

What then is left to restart hope? What can we do to open up our capacity to work together for a better world.

Luckily built into the American system are the mechanism of self healing and correction. The founders of our democracy never asserted that they created a perfect or totally evolved union. In deed the language of the declaration of independence reads that their attention was “to establish a more perfect union.” Evolution, corrrection and struggle were embodied in our founding documents. The enumerated rights continue to be refined and sharpened by those who have the courage to believe in the ideals of America, even when the practice of this nation do not measure up.

The American democracy is built as a bulwark against the absolutism of nationalism or the nihilism of tranny. On the days of discouragement the founding mothers and fathers of our democracy trusted the American citizens, however they would come to be defined, to save it from itself.

On the days of our discouragement we can decide to be courageous and engage in the work of democracy. This too is a decision based upon the insight that facts do not always reveal the truth. Based upon a melennia of experience with women and men of courage we know that there is power on passionate, persistent participation in the process of change. Martin Luther King in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize said “I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality.”