An Inconvenient Form Of Democracy

In all of my years, I don’t think I’ve heard or seen as much talk about democracy as I have over the past couple of years. Even my ancient history prof didn’t talk as much about it when he was droning on and on about the ancient Greeks and he was very good at droning on and on.

Everybody, well almost everybody, seems to have an opinion about democracy and those opinions, often including my own, are about how it’s being undermined. In Canada, the liberal media are positively beside themselves over how the Conservative government is a threat to democracy and people on social media are positively poetic (in a very loose definition of the term) in their outrage about it.

At its simplest, democracy is simply government by the people for the people and government is formed based on elections where the majority rules. This, of course, is agreeable to everyone until their particular candidate, political party or issue loses and then democracy becomes quite inconvenient.

At that point we start hearing phrases like “tyranny of the majority” and accusations of undermining the democratic process. When those fail to work out to well for those who have their underwear in a twist because their side lost the election, an allegation of political corruption or electoral fraud always seems to gather some momentum.

It is no secret, if you are a regular reader of this blog, that I have very little respect for the political process in general and politicians and their strategists in particular. I consider political parties to be the greatest threat to our democracy because they are not about governing; they’re about winning and holding power.

But, we the people are willing contributors to the erosion of our democracy because we the people don’t respect the democratic process any more than political parties and their Slick Willies working the phones in the war rooms out back. We the people prefer a convenient form of democracy; one that gives us what we want and screw everyone else.

Unfortunately, democracy is a messy business and it’s hard. It takes effort and, sad to say, more than just a little thought; more thought than many are willing to bring to the table. Consider these two examples.

In the United States, a recent poll clearly showed that more than 60% of Americans believe the United States is on the wrong track and it needs to change direction in order to recover. One would tend to believe that would be a pretty strong indictment against the current administration, whatever administration that might be.

You’d be wrong.

In fact, the latest electoral polls show the current administration leading in popular support and that would be a basis for criticism of the American system if it wasn’t for the fact that Canadians are even more confused.

The current Conservative government was elected with less than 45% public support and is routinely attacked in the media and online for being undemocratic and a threat to the fabric of Canada (whatever that might actually mean). This despite the fact that:

This government has piloted the country through the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression landing Canada at the top of the G7 in terms of economic stability and prosperity

Canada is ranked #2 in the world in terms of wellness, health and satisfaction according to   Deepak Chopra's  latest Gallop study

Of the ten cities in the world with the cleanest air, eight of them are in Canada

Despite allegations of electoral fraud, the only charges that have been laid for breaking the rules were laid against the opposition parties. The Conservative government has been charged with nothing.

Introduced a motion to recognized Quebec as a nation within a nation and not only restored the cuts to health care funding by the former Liberal government but has provided a long-term guarantee of annual payment increases.

A majority of Canadians are quite unhappy with their government nonetheless and continuously castigate it for its nefarious ways even though they are living in the most stable country in the world because of that government and there really aren’t any nefarious ways over which to be all that upset.

It is democracy, however, and we the people are entitled to voice our displeasure, no matter how irrational that displeasure may be. It appears that both Americans and Canadians never seem to have time to step back and actually consider the contradictory nature of what they want and what they say they want before they form their opinions or vote.

A majority of Americans don’t believe they have what they want or need but appear to be doggedly determined to on voting for more of it by supporting the administration that provided caused that dissatisfaction. Canadians, for the most part, have pretty much what they want and need but would like a different government anyway.

I believe this is what happens when thinking is replaced by feeling; when the ability to think critically, objectively or analytically is overruled by emotional knee-jerk reaction. Feeling is easy because it happens naturally. Thinking is hard because you actually have to make an effort.

Sometimes it's the result of focusing on a single issue without any understanding that in today's economy, all issues are inevitably linked at some point.

Americans like Barrack Obama. He’s charming most of the time, somewhat hip and cool, fairly intelligent, witty and he’s African-American. He’s stands as a symbol that their country has finally overcome the racial divide, at least politically and that anyone can, indeed, become president. The fact that he is an incompetent leader who has put America on a track with which a majority of Americans disagree is irrelevant to how the majority seem prepared to vote.

Canadians do not like Stephen Harper even though he is competent, focused, reasonably intelligent and efficient. He has provided solid leadership on most files anticipates events well and is consistent. But, and there is always a but, he isn’t very friendly, can be quite vicious in his attack on his political opponents, has the charisma of a tax auditor and his hair never blows in the wind. If Canada were a two party system, Mr. Harper would lose the next election despite his good governance and solid performance.

We don’t stop there, however, in our never ending search for convenient democracy. The definition of the democracy we want shifts from issue to issue.

We all claim to want our elected representatives to vote their conscience and that of their constituents rather than the party line but, as we saw recently with the vote in Canada on a motion to examine when life begins, that idea of democracy becomes quite inconvenient.

Rona Ambrose, the Minister for the Status of Women, voted her conscience. She voted in favour of the motion. This has outraged the Sisterhood who, even though the motion was soundly defeated, are calling for the minister’s head or at the very least, her resignation from cabinet. Winning the vote wasn’t good enough, the mere fact that Minister Ambrose voted in favour of something with which the Sisterhood disagreed is sufficient to toss the idea of democracy aside and gather the lynch mob together for a hanging.

It's pretty confused democratic activism that fights for the rights of women and then get's it's lingerie in a twist when one of them actually exercises that right and votes against how the Sisterhood thinks they should. The fact that the Sisterhood doesn't speak for all women, let alone all Canadians and that this is a democracy, is quite irrelevant to them. It is democracy at its most inconvenient so just grab the rope and find a tree.

Teachers’ unions in Canada and the United States have thrown their support, sometimes quite aggressively behind this this political party or that, in order to provide better education for the children through higher salaries and benefits to teachers. When the cupboard is bare and the existing government they supported introduces the concept of economic reality to them, teachers take to the streets and then throw their support to the next party only too willing to promise them a piece of the moon if they’re elected. What the government may have done in a broader sense is irrelevant. Teachers vote en mass against the government that is now undermining the classroom by freezing teachers' salaries or not providing them with the raises they want.

And that, Kids, is what we call convenient democracy. The idea of we the people agreeing on something by majority rule is only convenient when our team wins, or in the case of issues like ‘when life begins’ not even when our team wins. Then it isn’t enough that ‘our side’ won the day, there has to be repercussions against those who exercised their democratic right and voted against us.

Even children have a better understanding of democracy than we do but then, children aren’t as sophisticated as we are and they have too much integrity to understand the intricacies of the real world. For kids, it’s about forming a consensus, making a decision and getting on with playing; either that or simply throwing a hissy fit in order to get their own way.

And doesn’t that last bit sound like a lot of what the big folks do these days?

For grown up kids now, it’s about throwing a hissy fits when we lose the vote and then hammering away at every issue until the resolution is convenient for us. The problem, of course, is that when that happens it becomes quite inconvenient for someone else and so we start the silliness over again.

Perhaps one day we might learn that democracy is at its best when we recognize that it is not always convenient but that the decisions taken by the majority are necessary to move us forward as a nation. Until then, I’m afraid that for many of us, democracy will be little more than a hammer to try and force others to our way of thinking at worst and a parody of a results show for American Idol or X Factor at best complete with screaming fans, lots of television coverage but unfortunately without the charm of Simon Cowell.

© 2012 Maggie's Bear

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The Gospel Of The Clueless

"There is an almost universal quest for easy answers

and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people

more than having to think."

- Martin Luther King

Do you get the feeling lately that there aren’t very many people paying much attention these days? I don’t mean paying attention to an individual issue, I mean paying attention period. Everywhere I go whether it is online or in the real world, I run into people who are so lost in their own little time and place they are completely oblivious to what is going on around them.

I was downtown the other day, stopped at a red light. A nicely dressed man, about forty, crossed the intersection in front of me with his finger buried up his nose. I can understand people in their cars forgetting that their windows are actually two-way glass and indulging in a little nasal mining but out on the street?

He struck gold and hauled it out of his nose to take a good look at it in the middle of the intersection, pausing to hold his finger up to seriously examine his find. What in God’s name could anyone possibly have up their nose that they would want to examine it? Were they expecting that this one time, whatever it is would be different than the hundreds of times before?

It’s incredible. People are completely tuned out.

Everywhere I go people are on their cell and smart phones. They’re texting, emailing and talking and they do it while they’re driving and while they’re trying to cross the street without regard to personal safety or the safety of others. Too often, they are so focused on the momentous communication they just received that they are completely unaware of the half-ton truck in front of which they’ve just walked.

I watched one young woman walk out into an intersection against a red light. She was so focused on her mobile phone, she didn’t notice either the light or even the intersection until the traffic slammed to a screeching halt to avoid running her over. Then, of course, she was suitably annoyed that someone almost hit her and forced to look up from her phone.

It is life without thought; life without even an attempt to think.

Earlier today I was listening to a radio talk show I particularly enjoy and they were discussing the issue of swaddling. You know, swaddling; as in “and Mary wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manager.” That kind of swaddling.

After centuries of swaddling newborns, apparently it has suddenly become dangerous. It arrests the development of newborns, could cause hip dysplasia, lead to SIDS and death. Where is the evidence to support this nonsense? Where are the overwhelming reports of cases of swaddling having threatened, injured or killed babies?

There aren’t any, of course. Like so many of the solutions being offered today, they are solutions by self-anointed experts looking for a problem.

The sad thing is that because we have become dumber, a lot of people will jump on the anti-swaddling issue just as so many jumped on the “vaccinations cause autism” bandwagon. God, even Oprah was behind that cause and her devoted fans followed her mindlessly as if she was a female reincarnation of Moses leading them out of bondage to the Promised Land.

It was a crock, a fraud by a single doctor in England who falsified a study for no more noble reason than the cash he received from a pharmaceutical company. Hundreds of thousands stopped having their children vaccinated for diseases like polio which was all but eradicated and is now making a comeback thanks to this stupidity.

It wasn’t that there wasn’t more than ample information available at the World Health Organization and government health departments around the world that contradicted the report. There were but people were too lazy to do any independent research. People like Oprah and Jenny McCarthy said it was so and that was good enough reason for them to risk their children’s lives.

To this day, even though the fraud has been exposed, there are still far too many who believe that vaccinations cause autism because people like Oprah once said so.

We have more information available to us than ever before thanks to technology but technology has dumbed us down to the point of becoming almost mindless. It has made us intellectually fat and lazy; too lazy to actually research things for ourselves and then analyze critically what we’ve learned. Why bother when you have Wikipedia and thousands of blogs and social media sites just itching to tell you the truth?

We can no longer separate fact from opinion let alone from fiction or fantasy.

There was a time when we actually paid experts to provide the facts for our encyclopedias. Now, any idiot with a keyboard and an Internet connection is an expert and there are plenty more idiots just willing to believe whatever they type.

It is the Gospel Of The Clueless.

The technology whiz kids predict that soon our refrigerators will maintain an inventory of the food they contain and when we’re running low, they will order more for us. Samsung is already producing a refrigerator with Wi-Fi for that amateur chef who suffers separation anxiety from being away from the computer for more than a few minutes.

Isn’t that just what we needed; machines that think for us and keep us connected to the Great Mindless Void that the Internet has become? Our phones are already smarter than too many of us and now we’re getting ready to have household appliances that will be smarter than us as well.

At this rate, we’ll be lucky if most people remember how to tie their shoe laces in the not too distant future although some bright light will probably develop an app to do that for us.

Whether it is political debate or an understanding of the major social issues challenging us today, most people have no more clues about what drives them than their toaster, although it appears their toaster may soon have enough technology to figure it out.

Everything has been reduced to emotions now rather than analytical thought. Emotions are easy, thought is difficult and requires some effort but we are becoming a society that is unprepared to make much of an effort to do very much of anything.

We don’t even want to pay our own way anymore. It’s just easier to whine about how difficult life is and demand that someone else pay for a part, if not all, of what we want.

University is expensive and working to earn enough money while going to university is hard so, make someone else pay. That’s easier and doesn’t take any effort at all.

Voting based on a candidate’s record actually means having to examine the record and compare it to the promises that were made in the last election and that, we all know, is hard. It’s just easier to support someone based on our feelings. If we like him or her, or think they’re cool; that should be good enough reason to vote them into office. What damage they might do while in office is really irrelevant compared to what we feel.

We’ve reached a time and place where nothing matters but what we’re doing at the moment. We don’t plan, we don’t think and we are unaware of the bigger world around us. We go online, see a few tweets about an issue and thanks to Twitter or Facebook or whatever, we have all we need to know to decide whether or not we will support or oppose it.

Thinking is not required. Neither is being aware let alone committed.

You don’t have to take my word for it, look at the inane comments from both sides of the Presidential election argument currently on Twitter. If you didn’t know better, you’d swear it was a badly written comedy show starring Charlie Sheen or an episode of the Jerry Springer Show. The amount of rational thought or critical analysis that has gone into the discussion is less than is required to slap together a piece of Ikea furniture.

Ok, bad example. Assembling Ikea furniture isn’t all that easy but neither is thinking. It takes effort; more effort than picking your nose in public or fiddling with your iPhone. It takes assembling information; real information, not the opinionated articles of this blog or others and once you have that information, it requires analyzing it.

I know that’s a lot of effort for many but if deciding who you’re going to trust to govern your country isn’t worth that effort; then you might as well let your refrigerator vote for you because it will probably give it at least some serious thought before casting its ballot.

© 2012 Maggie's Bear

all rights reserved

The content of this article is the sole property of Maggie's Bear but a link to it may be shared by those who think it may be of interest to others

Follow The Bear on Twitter: @maggsbear or connect on Facebook: Maggie's Bear