By
I am sad and scared, but as someone else said, I am not powerless today.
The oft-repeated line is that democracy requires an informed citizenry, but I think it requires much, much more than that. In this most militarily powerful (yet dangerously self-absorbed) society of ours, with a Constitution and Bill of Rights which we proudly hold up to the world as an example of representative and inclusive government by the will of people, I am amazed by the numbers of those who feel disenfranchised and powerless (do we need to go back to how the current president was elected in the first place?).
I am just one of the millions of Americans who look upon the actions of our government and our corporations sometimes with horror (as in the case of chemical warfare upon the land and people of Columbia), and sometimes with anger (the ignoring of the Geneva Convention guidelines for dealing with prisoners).
Democracy means more than being a spectator to the actions our elected government, because while voting is necessary for democracy, it is far from sufficient. Democracy requires participation from the citizenry.
You’re probably thinking that you are too busy, or it really won’t make any difference. Perhaps that is even true, but there is blood on our hands from things we don’t even know about.
After September 11th, we asked ourselves the very ignorant question “Why do they hate us?” (which was originally asked by the Palestinians a year ago in reference to American support for the Israeli occupation of their land). Some of us accept and believe the answers our President has supplied: it is because they are evil, or they hate freedom.
I personally find this to be a wholly insufficient and insulting explanation.
It sounds like something we would say to children because they are incapable of comprehending the real reasons.
Furthermore, the cost of these political decisions is not free. The increases in the military budget, the increases in funding to the “war on drugs/terror,” the huge expansion in government itself, isn’t funded out of our presidents’ pocket. That is our tax money, our social security, and medical care, that is our expenditure on ensuring that our children are educated. It isn’t our President or the Cabinet’s jobs that are lost due to our government’s economic policies and their favoring corporations over workers – it’s our jobs, and our lives.
Perhaps it is too much trouble to understand why many Europeans consider us to be more dangerous than the so-called “axis of evil,” and are about to hit us with some trade embargoes.
And it might be irrelevant to understand why the Coca Cola company is being sued for torture, kidnapping and assault. But realize this, while there were casualties at the Pentagon, the bulk of the loss of life was of ordinary people who were held responsible for things they chose not to know about.
I say chose because while we have the greatest access to information than any other nation in the world (although that right is also being threatened), we have some of the world’s lowest levels of political participation.
Too many of us chose not to get involved in the decision-making processes of things that could cost us our lives.
If what we do doesn’t speak loud enough, what we don’t do takes up the slack. There was a time, not too long ago, where we felt it was the duty of a government to protect citizens from pure market forces, the type of forces that led to the brutalities of the industrial revolution.
But now we spend millions more on welfare programs for corporations, than on citizens and the percentage of tax that corporations pay has decreased to its lowest levels in 40 years.
We treat the rest of the world as a colony: extracting materials and labor, and exporting misery cleverly disguised as free trade. And we will continue to be held responsible.
Josephine Khamisi is a senior sociology major and guest columnist for The Cardinal. Contact:
josephine_khamisi@louisvillecardinal.com
