Dodging Bullets

A few years back, my friend John and I were talking about voting. I've known John for a fairly large chunk of my life. He's a former cop who became a fireman, and is the type of person who's worldview was forged whilst acting as a kind of human wall between civilization and barbarism. At the time, John didn't believe in voting. He thought it changed nothing, it altered nothing for the better, and had a generally cynical (though entirely understandable) view of those in public life. On one level, he was undoubtedly correct. It takes a certain type of person to go into politics, and while it may be true that many good people enter into the political arena, rarely do they come out as optimistic, idealistic, or even as ethical as they went in.

My take on the whole act of voting was entirely antithetical to his. To me, the mere act of voting is almost holy. To this day, I still get a bit of a thrill while indulging in the act. If anything, I find the act of voting more thrilling than when I was 18 and was first eligible. I've voted for third party candidates, but mostly vote for the Grand Ol' Party candidates across the board. But that really is ancillary to the point.

Yesterday, anywhere from 60% to 70% of the eligible Iraqi population voted for national assembly candidates. Bombs went off. Bullets were discharged. Threats were bandied about. And clearly the success of the Iraqi elections yesterday are no guarantee that Iraq will become a successful democracy in the near future, if at all. But it's a start. To my mind, the US didn't really become a real nation until the end of the Civil War. From 1776 to 1865, the United States went through two governmental frameworks (Articles of Confederation, the Constitution of 1789), a defining Supreme Court decision (Marbury v. Madison) that decided where the locus of power in the government should be, and the Civil War, which settled the most unsettled constitutional questions of the young republic, that being where the true power of the United States sat (federally, it so turned out) , and the inherent rights of ALL men, not just caucasian, Protestant ones. And through these turbulent gyrations, many of which were violent, we come to 2005. If the nascent Iraqi republic goes through even 1/10th of what the United States has gone through in the last 229 yrs., they're in for a rough ride. The best that can be hoped for is that those that don't get their way in determining the direction of the nation don't pull out of the parliamentary process and decide to chart their own course. This may well happen...it happened here during the Civil War, and it happened more recently in Ireland in 1922. Democracy is rough. Debate can and will be ribald, political adversaries will insult each other, and rhetoric will get nasty. Here's to hoping that when all of these things occur in the young Iraqi democracy that the whole process won't collapse. But for now, there's a honeymoon phase. And it's pretty encouraging.

As for my friend John, after making the point to him that people in other countries dodge bullets, bombs, and threats just to vote, and that one shouldn't squander their right when they have to deal with much less worry, he finally came around. (He told me his father, also a fireman, told him the same thing.) John Locke postulated that the power of the ruler does not derive from God, but from the people, who are given the right to choose their rulers by God. Thus there is not a divine right of kings, but a divine right of citizens. This was and is a revolutionary concept, almost a quasi-religious one. Why would anyone squander their divine right?

John votes regularly now and has for the last two election cycles.