Oh for god’s sake STOP!
Global Warming, Is a threat to democracy
Global Cooling, Is a threat to democracy
MAGA, Is a threat to democracy
Trump, Is a threat to democracy
Vaccine Hesitancy, Is a threat to democracy
Israel Palestine conflict, Is a threat to democracy
January 6th Protests, Is a threat to democracy
Questioning the media, Is a threat to democracy
Questioning the Government, Is a threat to democracy
If everything the media and politicians warn us about, Is a threat to democracy, then nothing is.
Alternatively, if everything is a threat to democracy then democracy is some seriously weak assed shit.
Neither of these assertions are particularly correct.
What these morons are saying is anything and everything beyond their control is a threat to their idea of democracy.
Which leads me to wonder if they understand what democracy is, or that if used incorrectly, democracy may be a bad thing.
You want to see true unfettered absolute democracy?
Look at the Pro Palestinian protestors on college campuses preventing other students from getting to & from their classes. Is this not The Majority exercising absolute democracy and using their numbers to overrule the rights of a minority?
How about Pro Palestinian protestors interrupting a pride parade? Aside from the multiple ironies of Queers for Palestine being on both sides of the “battle line”. Protestors versus Pride Parade is absolute RAW Democracy in action. (There’s also a lesson in there. With Palestinians we can’t have anything they don’t want us to have.)
Democracy can easily be used to trample the rights of the individual.
That’s why The Constitution and Bill of Rights are so important. When you understand those documents are the only thing standing between us and Pure Democracy (a.k.a. tyranny of the mob), the importance of these documents appears in a whole new light.
I’ve come to believe that the media and our politicians are overusing the word democracy so that we stop “hearing it”. Much like the overused word “racist”. I’ve started wondering if this is a prelude to redefining the word to mean something else in practice if not actual definition.
We don’t now and never have lived in a democracy. Our form of government was designed as a Constitutional Republic. That design was chosen so that the rights of the individual would be preserved regardless of the desires of the Mob.
There’s also an interesting bit in The Constitution that says something to the effect, rights not enumerated are assumed to be held or retained by the individual, not the state. I’m paraphrasing but the meaning was clear to me as an 11 or 12 year old.
My right to do as I pleased was enshrined in The Constitution…
To be clear, my parents were pleased and impressed that I’d read and comprehended The Constitution. They did not however buy my assertion that my misbehavior was Constitutionally protected. I recall their rebuttal was completely rational.
“You live in our house, as a dependent on our largess, therefore you will obey our rules until such time as you are no longer dependent upon us for food and shelter. Now, GO TO YOUR ROOM!“
It wasn’t until many years later that I learned my Father’s face had been beet red not out of anger, as I had supposed at the time. He’d been doing one of the hardest things a parent has to do. Being parental, when what he really wanted to do was bust up laughing. He told me in my 30’s that he & my mother had gone out to the driveway and laughed till they cried.
I can say these days, it’s a good thing my Father is dead, much as I miss him. With the way the government has been doing things over the past decade or two, my Brother is convinced, and I concur, that our Father would have been out in the shed or in a bunker making ammo and planning for “La Revolution!”
He’d have seen his planning as duty to The Founding Documents, in particular that part that says if the government has become so corrupt and distorted that it no longer serves the people, then the people should overthrow it.
Even in the 1970’s I remember my Father saying that the government should be “big red switched”. A.K.A. abolished and restarted from The Bill of Rights, Constitution, and basic principals. His thinking was that for 1 hour or day there’d be no laws whatsoever. He was ahead of his time. He was really talking about something similar to “The Purge”.
His thinking was that you have to re-elect all new officials, all the laws get erased. The government got started up again with the basics of commonly accepted laws. Don’t kill, don’t steal, that sort of thing. He figured that any scores that got settled while the government was restarting and laws being re-adopted was probably acceptable losses. He’d sometimes go a bit further saying that the folks who got taken out during the restart, probably would have deserved it.
Funny thing, now that I think about it. I wouldn’t consider my Father and his somewhat radical ideas a threat to The Republic. But I could see how his ideas would be considered a threat to the “Democracy” that our politicians are trying to defend.
I’d hate to be worried about my Father and the rest of the family getting “Ruby Ridged” or “Wacoed” by the Feds. There was a time when I called those incidents “outlier” events. Now, I’ve begun to see the Feds for what they are. They’ve shown us all exactly who and what they are in the past 4 years.
When things like the following have become common place:
3am raids against lawyers who represented a political enemy.
Hunting down people who were simply at the capital on Jan 6th.
Kicking down the doors of ministers over a political dispute with weapons drawn and children in the house.
10-15 vehicles with 60+ agents of the FBI in full tactical load out to arrest one 65 year old retiree and his wife.
Really? This is the “Democracy” our politicians are screaming about protecting?
I’ve seen old newsreels of this. Jackbooted authoritarian thugs kicking down doors.
It was common in Soviet Russia, we denounced it then. It is common in Communist China, our politicians seem to be looking the other way these days. We also saw this behavior in 1930s & 1940s Germany. While the Hugo Boss uniforms were impressive, the authoritarianism was not, and we saw millions murdered. At the end of that conflict. When the trials were ongoing, the common refrain was “I was only following my orders.”
We’ve already heard testimony before Congress that sounded a lot like, “I was only following orders.”
If this kind of government is what our politicians, specifically those in high offices want to protect, then we have a serious problem.
The question is, how radical will the solution to the problem have to be?
I know, I’m an evil bastard.
It’s a real good thing that I had a bourbon or two before the SOTU address. Otherwise I’d have thrown a rock through the television. (Shooting a Television as some of my southern ancestors tended to do, is a waste of ammunition. Rocks are easier to come by and you can wind up a nice baseball pitch with them. Or you can just use a baseball.)