Day Two, Democracy Project

I am “from” a small town in Arkansas.  The statement is a bit misleading.  The operative word in the first sentence is from.  My family moved to the Central Valley of California when I was just a boy, a country boy; and a familiar saying of people from the South is that “You can take the boy out of the country but you can’t take the country out of the boy.”  Some displaced Southerners would call the joke a lament or an excuse, but I claim it with perhaps misplaced pride, but surely with gratefulness.  I also claim with considerable gratefulness and pride that I was a teacher.  The operative word in that last sentence is was; but just as you can take the teacher out of the classroom, you can’t take the classroom out of the teacher.  I do this BLOG writing as an excuse to trot out and exercise whatever it was that made me love the classroom and made me love being a teacher... so there you have my excuse for this little BLOG project developed around the various brands of democracy.

Yesterday I wrote about the difference between “representative democracy” and “direct (some call it pure) democracy.”  Direct democracy, or pure democracy, is much easier to sell to folks who settle quickly for products that sound and look more attractive at first glance.  They are the people who don’t want to spend the time or intellectual energy to wonder if what they are buying will be good for them in the long term.  Direct democracy sounds like a good thing.  It is easy to see why someone unschooled in the old-fashioned subject of Civics might never doubt that direct, pure democracy could be anything but good for “the people”?  How can “the will of the people” be anything but good for “the people”?  How could “the will of the people,” for example, be the catalyst for tyranny? How can the majority be wrong?

Although the tyrants we remember from history are most often individual monsters,  a mob can be tyrannical. In 1916 a mob in Waco, Texas,  attacked and murdered an African American teenager.  Jesse Washington was accused of raping and murdering the wife of a farmer for whom he worked.  No eyewitnesses saw the crime, but Jesse had been seen near the house about the time of the woman’s death.  He was arrested and questioned by the county sheriff.  He eventually confessed, but no one knows what was done to him to get the confession.  He was tried for murder in a courtroom filled with angry neighbors of the woman who had been raped and murdered.  He pled guilty and was sentenced to death.  Immediately after the sentence was read, Jesse was dragged out of the courtroom and lynched in front of Waco’s city hall.  The town square was filled with over 10,000 people, including city officials and police, who watched the attack.  The atmosphere was celebratory, like an event at a county fair.  Many children came to watch during their lunch hour at school.  A group of men held Jesse down while one of them castrated him while he was still very much alive.  Another cut off his fingers.  They hanged him over a bonfire and repeatedly lowered and raised him over the fire for about two hours.  After the fire was extinguished, his horribly charred body was cut down and dragged through the town.  Parts of his body were sold as souvenirs.  Many photographs were taken by a professional photographer who printed them and sold them as postcards in Waco.  I decided not to use any of them because they are too dreadful and because they would surely divert attention away from the point I am trying to make. More than 10,000 American citizens, a clear majority, with apparent consent of elected officials, took the initiative to carry out a sentence handed down by a jury; so an important lesson from history is that tyranny isn’t limited to actions by one powerful person.  The decisions of a small group or the actions of a large mob may be deliberately and blatantly tyrannical. When you check the dictionary, you’ll find that the first definition of tyranny is “cruel and oppressive government or rule,” and a second definition is “cruel, unreasonable, or arbitrary use of power or control.”  Of course, most of the tyrants who are called by that name, the ones whom we recall from history lessons, were individuals.  The very real Adolph Hitler was a tyrant; and although she is a fictional character who lives forever in a fairy tale, Cinderella’s step-mother is a tyrant. There have been teacher tyrants, recognized as such and feared by children.  History books are full of accounts of tyrants bred in religious institutions. The list is long of people, some of them saints, who were martyred by religious tyrants.  Tyrants are bullies, but there are petty bullies who never gain enough power to become tyrants.  Most of us learn to avoid being hurt by bullies, but when bullies gain enough power to become tyrants, few of their targets escape hurt unless they can get out of easy reach. 

A major goal of American Tea Party leaders is to elect leaders who will amend the Constitution of the United States in ways that will effectively change our representative democracy into a direct democracy.  Grover Norquist, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and a whole bunch of other spokespersons for the Tea Party movement say that their suggestions for change are “the will of the people.”  They like to begin their declaration with “what the people want.”  Their major theme is that government is too big and essentially bad.  They are fond of saying “that government is best which governs least,” which they usually attribute to Thomas Jefferson, but there is no evidence whatsoever that Jefferson said it.  The statement comes from Henry David Thoreau’s essay entitled “Civil Disobedience,” published in 1849; but Thoreau’s intent clearly was not to do away with government. He criticizes American social institutions, including governmental institutions and policies, which promote or condone injustice. His essay is basically a statement of his reasons for opposing slavery and the Mexican-American War. Thoreau said his first obligation was to do what he believed was right even if it meant not obeying the law dictated by the majority.  His point that when a person sees clearly that his government is unjust, he should disobey that part of government that condones and promotes injustice.  Thoreau’s famous essay is an argument stating that the United States government was wrong in continuing to allow some people to own other people as slaves.  He believed he was obligated not to participate in any way with any aspect of slavery.  I don’t know anybody in 2012 who disagrees with Thoreau on the subject of slavery.  There is no honest reason for anybody, including all those Tea Party folks who consider themselves super patriots, to use Thoreau’s statement as their rational for doing away with government programs, especially if the government programs at which they are taking aim exist specifically to alleviate suffering and hardship of citizens. 

More tomorrow...