VOTE!

Vote!

By Tim Krenz

February 17, 2014

100. 2014 The Cepia Club LLC

www.cepiaclub.com

Democracy works. Let it do so, and it performs a sort of magic. Perhaps it cannot do great magic, but it has a consensus for going forward and a tolerance for differences proportional to the effort that goes into it. Democracy, almost in contradiction, will only work if voters exercise an informed and thoughtful ballots at times of elections and the same kind of choices all times between official voting.

Citizens in a democracy, not subject to any power but themselves as owners of their government, possess what philosophers call a “natural right” to choose among themselves the government and levels of government to govern all. By definition, a people with a sovereign right to rule their own affairs do not set government above them, or allow the trusted servants of government to overlord the citizens who choose their leaders. Simple in concept, hard to do, democracy defines no separation of citizenship or rank between those chosen to govern and those who choose the leaders. In short, the government comes of the people, and must always remain accountable to the people for it to exist as democracy.

Democracy claims no perfection, and neither can any form of civil society or agreement to coexist made by those holding the power of sovereignty. And “sovereignty” means an ownership of the lawful right to political rule, and such rights can exist in unwritten or in written form (compact, constitution, etc. describing how to make laws that bind people together with common interests). Democracy like any human invention possesses flaws, but it has the fewest flaws within it than almost any type of governing system invented throughout history. (By definition, “anarchy” means the non-existence of government, and we can therefore exclude it from discussion, even though anarchy has certain unstated rules in every sense of the term).

Democracy without informed and interested voters suffers a fatal wound because citizens do not participate at a moderately high level of involvement or concern. Democracy can die, as several examples of history show—Athens in the late 5^th Century B.C.E., Russia's social democracy between March 1917 and its end in November of that same year, and the Weimar constitution in Germany with the advent of the Nazi Enabling Act, March 1933, to name some examples. When snuffed due to a lack of caring or concern for democracy, the body politic exudes the putrid decay where the maggots of politics thrive. The parasites of dictators, thieves, militarists, and elitists, eat off the dead democracy the flesh and wealth of a gift that forerunners and ancestors gave to the future—a living democracy then demised because it lacked the nurture and growth through its host people.

We as citizens of OUR democracy can save democracy in only one way. By exercising more democracy, over more issues, and obtaining more facts for sound choices, voters can better recognize the different choices as they actually exist, and also assert a position to demand more choices in every aspect of civil society. The acts described can revive any democracy.

In such a simple way as voting, a peaceful change, indeed a non-violent revolution in perspective and expectations, occurs. Instead of breeding parasites that feed off the lives and wealth of citizens, the
“body politic” and civil society sustains itself, resuscitates its life, body and blood, and brings more thought and reason into the process of government. With that, a little optimism and hope for a more humane future and dignified co-existence begins to strengthen. Conflict and even violence may not disappear, but those cancers of humanity become treatable and more limited.

Choices for democracy grow the length and breadth of personal liberty and the increase tolerance for others who live by their acts of choice that do not intrude the safety or steal the property of others. In such a state of choices, justice as an impartial and incorruptible source of legitimate rewards and punishments without favor to birth, wealth, position or fraud becomes commonplace.

Choices in democracy does not mean more flavors of ice cream at the grocery store or different television programs to watch. Those compose a modern ration of a bread and the circus of distraction. Choices in a democracy bring something more. Voting in democracy, based on facts and reason, make those choices for change more real, and bring a more perfect solution to practical ills that confront the world, even down to the village and town voting precincts.

By choosing to participate in a democracy, especially at the times and places available, in an election or between them, most futures can still arrive and most problems find solutions. At least we will have chosen together the fate we want to create.

VOTE!!