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"We need a man or woman, a champion if you will, to come out swinging with the rest of us standing behind him/her....We need a credible, political, well-known person to publically say what we all know. The liars, crooks, murderers, and thieves have stolen our country." --acmavm
It seems to be the lesson that the Gods of Democracy are trying to teach us, that we cannot rely on our leaders, and that we ourselves must BE the democracy that we desire to have. We must create it ourselves. We must live it every day.
If leaders arise, they will be slain. And if we rely on them, there goes our power. Those of us who lived through the JFK, RFK and Martin Luther King assassinations know this deeply. And it has been more recently experienced with the uninvestigated death of Senator Paul Wellstone (who had pledged to lead the fight against the Iraq war, and had the skill and depth and political support to do it). In a less dire--but equally bitter--circumstance, our vigilant Sec of State in Calif, Kevin Shelley, was recently driven from office and his career ruined, in a media campaign of unproven, trivial changes. He had decertified all DREs in Calif, and sued Diebold for their lies about their machines, and set the highest standards in the nation for electronic voting. Now gone. Replaced by a Schwarzenegger appointee and patsy. (Step on a Bush buddy, and interfere with the Bush Cartel's election crimes, and see your career in ashes.)
Just when we think we have a leader who will fix things for us--gone, fini.
The premise of democracy is the sovereignty of the people, not the leaders. We've come far, far away from this premise. I blame it partly on the development of atomic weapons, which turned the president into a virtual God, with the power to annihilate all of us and all life on earth. One man. One button. You cannot have a democracy in those circumstances--or it's damned difficult. The person who holds that power is too much reverenced, and the system that upholds him is too worshipful and too fetishistic, and those attitudes bleed down into the lower halls of power.
Why is it so nerve-wracking to have a president whom many of us feel is nuts, or teetering on nuts, and/or is furthermore the puppet of only partially visible corporate and financial powers? It's because of nuclear weapons--the fear, the reverence that such power inspires--and, of course, the necessity of having a stable, reasonable, decent person with their finger on the button (someone whom we feel would think of the rest of us, if it came to that). All other policy comes into it as well. We want someone as president who is looking out for our interests, the public interest. But it's the nuclear (and perhaps also general military) power that makes us feel that we are teetering on the brink of chaos, with this lunatic in the White House.
In our democracy--even as designed, a Republic--it shouldn't matter so much. We should be able to trust in the balanced powers of government to restrain a bad president. There is TOO MUCH AT STAKE. That is part of the problem.
Also, in theory anyway, the leaders of our country, state and local jurisdictions are there to serve US. What they are doing, or supposedly doing, is public SERVICE. Think about that for a moment. How far have we come from that idea?
Most of our leaders seem to be either into self-puffery and aggrandizement, or self enrichment, or both. The Bush Cartel has done much to destroy the idea of public service, but it didn't start with them. It goes back several decades to massive infusions of corporate money into the political system, and our inability, as a people, to put a stop to it. (We should have enacted a Constitutional amendment, long ago, banning all private money in political campaigns--and should have done it when we had the chance to, with Democratic Congresses. I know, alas and alack--we didn't.)
Add the Bush Cartel into this picture--the picture of an already eroded democracy--and you have fascism: leaders who are so removed from the people that they freely implement their own agenda to benefit themselves, don't care in the least what the majority of the people want, and seek more and more power to continue serving themselves.
We cannot correct this long-developing situation with a leader arising and doing it for us. For one thing, as I said above, the fascists who control our government right now--the Bush Cartel--will not allow a populist leader to arise. They will kill or ruin him or her. And that will send us back into the doldrums again, as has happened before. And they will corrupt others (they are masters at that). Many of our Democratic Party leaders fall into that category--corrupted by HAVA money (over $4 billion), or by "revolving door" employment with electronic voting machine companies (local/state election officials), or by military-industrial complex bribery and collusion, or--and I think this is a big one--they favor war in the Middle East, and were not all that interested in ousting the Bush regime. Or--another big one--they live in a bubble of riches and power, and want to stay there. They may think they are doing good there, but then gradually become protectors of the ruling elite.
Leaders expecting privileges and reverance; expecting protection from the huddled masses. Flying high above us all. (Paul Wellstone was one of the last leaders on the national stage who didn't live in that bubble--he was a genuine populist.)
And add to all this, the fear that the Bush Cartel inspires--fear of being ruined, fear of being anthraxed, fear of your plane falling out of the air--and you have a paralyzed political system.
So...what do we do?
I think we have to look hard at this situation, and see it clearly. It has similarities to historical situatons but they are not exact. Hitler's Germany, for instance, was (is) a small country, with a homogenous culture--much more easily controlled. Ours is a huge country, with a greatly diverse population, very difficult to control.
So maybe the solution here is not national. That's what I'm pointing at. I see a lot of things pointing that way, to our diversity, to this huge landscape, and its divisions into states and counties, as our strength.
I think we have to give up any notion of a White Knight coming along and saving us from the Bush regime, or any big dramatic event, like revelation of their election fraud. At best, such a revelation might usher in a more liberal cartel, who may back off from the more extreme corporate policies (privatization of Social Security, preemptive war), but won't likely go forward with real reform. It might bring short term relief, but won't tackle the underlying conditions that led to this fascist coup.
I'm not saying don't go for it--revelation of the fraud (and other crimes), and a political fight, a fight for the White House and the Congress--in so far as we can fight, with a rigged election system, and the news propaganda machine. I'm just saying don't count on winning a national battle just yet. We've seen just how bad things are with the election reform bills on Congress. We do not have a just and fair Congress, one that acts in the public interest. We can't count on them, or on any national entity (not even the League of Women voters, it turns out--the leadership is totally out to lunch, or corrupt.)
Secondly, we need to fight where our strength is, locally. And the first battle is election reform, which I think has to take place--and is taking place--from the bottom up.
Our mistake is in thinking that we can leap from the bottom of the political heap all the way to the top--to the national political scene (wholly controlled and corrupt, as it is)--in one big leap--either by the sudden enlightenment and action of some political leader, or by the interaction of forces (politics, news media investigation, court cases) that, individually, show no signs of helping this country restore democracy, but that some of us keep placing unreasonable faith in.
Democracy always happens from the bottom up. It is never granted by grace of the powers that be. We have to get that through our heads. And start ACTING LIKE people who BELIEVE IN DEMOCRACY. Us. Our collective consciousnes and will. The power, the sovereignty of ordinary people, as a people, as a nation. That's what we have to believe in, and ENACT.
The powers that be who took away our right to vote are not going to give it back because we ask them to, or because it's the right thing to do. They wrongfully took it away in the first place, on purpose, to disenfranchise us. But we might just be able to influence our local registrar to get rid of DREs. We have much more power to throw such a person out of office, than we do to throw Bush out of office. And we have a much smaller population base to activate to that purpose.
We need to exercise patience and humility, and we need to work together. Patience--this is a long term project. Humilty--it's not up to you or me, it's up to us all, collectively. We each just need to do our part, not everything. Put aside the idea of heroes and leaders. Think democracy. Real democracy. Not this sham we have now, of the rich and the poor, and the powerful and the unpowerful. Democracy as the collective sovereignty of the people.
If you believe in democracy, in real democracy, then know this, friend: You are not alone.
"We are the ones we have been waiting for."
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