The Great Debate: Are We a Democracy?

In our present political climate, it seems these days everyone has something to say. It takes little than a quick login to Facebook and one can be flooded with anti-Obama demotivational posters or someone organizing a march on some capitalist monument, mixed in with the normal day to day oversharing that people have become accustomed to via the advent of social networking sites.

Here recently even the president himself is using this medium to talk to the people who have clicked the grand old like button on his page, many of us because we want to know what he has to say – and he shares A LOT! While I’m sure there is someone in charge of the Presidential Facebook page, that person has succumbed to the mighty addiction of oversharing every single thought they have.

In some ways, Facebook has become a moment to a new kind of protest, one that is strictly on the Internet, where millions of people no doubt are quickly organizing. Occupy Wallstreet has become one of the pioneers, capitalizing on the idea of using social meeting to organize live protests. I’m sure there will be more of this as people who do not align with that view point are organizing online protests against the movement, as if to say that Occupy has become a genital wart on an already troubled society. While I disagree with the counter points, not that I’m sure that any of the counter points really demonstrate anything other than there are people who have never bothered to actually find out what Occupy Wallstreet is about, they are creating counter points and advertising them.

Before this level of ­organization though, there were just angry people. People whom were friends 99% of the time, often people who drank together or partied in some fashion, probably played video games in the floor together, and maybe even exercised their geek impulses together by organizing World of Warcraft parties, or all night anime marathons. But then one person posted an inflammatory, perhaps misinformed opinion about some news story they saw, and all hell broke loose.

Many of my friends are conservative Libertarians and often a post would conclude in concurrence by the majority, but I’m a Liberal and I also love playing devil’s advocate. Facebook and places like 

Facebook are often a great deal of fun to people like me as a result of my often angry friends, who hate my ideals, but for some reason continue to love me, whether it be for my antics, or my willingness to express my point of view…we’ll it’s probably rarely the later.

Often times, debating with these people, leads to a grand question about the nature of our political structure and exactly how America is supposed to run. While this is often discussed in greater detail than the simplified question I have posed, it is apparent that not only are we as a society divided on which political party is best for this country at this point in our history, but we are also divided on what our actual political structure is…or perhaps should be.

Democracy, Democracy, Democracy. You can’t go anywhere near CNN, Politico, Fox News, MSNBC, and you can go ahead and rule out C-Span as well, without this word being slung around. Our previous president launched a war on terrorism and used it as a medium to install Democracy in Iraq. 

President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have also used this term quite a bit in relation to the protests throughout the Middle East aiming to magnify the glaring difference in political structure in those regions. Somehow this word has become synonymous with freedom and therefore with the United States, despite our country actually not being a Democracy.

Any Republican or Libertarian will point out this flaw in a debate. Anything referring to Democracy will get you referred to the Constitution, which reads very clearly that each state in our Union are guaranteed a Republican form of Government. In their minds this often leads to the winning Grand Slam in the 9^th inning of the 7^th game of the Word Series and is often used to excuse the ideals of any leftist who may be speaking in a rightwing dominated discussion. As a matter of fact, after doing a great deal of research, I came across a speech that proclaimed that when the expression “We the People” is used it is actually referring to the electorate and not actually the people themselves.

Based on my research, a Republic has some differences from the government a large percentage of people living in America think we are in, which is usually called a Representative Democracy. While I will spare the “Our schools have lied to us speech,” it is important to know that our founding fathers apparently wanted a Republic, despite the fact that we run our government like a Representative Democracy.

Many conservatives have used the argument in the past that Democracy often is the final stop before Socialism, Communism, or any kind of government based on a Marxist model. Be that as it may, the irony is that our government is supposed to serve the people, not the people serving the government, which some would say is the biggest difference between the Western and Eastern political landscape.

Conservatives often say that Democracy and mass rule are synonymous and which is ironic, given that the Conservatives have driven social standards in this country for years. You marry, you don’t have premarital sex, you don’t abort children for any reason, you don’t have sex with people of the same gender, and above all questioning the government at all makes you anti-American without question.

The Republic model is supposed to be the end all, defacto, best form of government in existence. It handles the problems that are inherent with mass rule, which anyone who set foot in a public high school probably knows about in great detail. Supposedly removing that element allows the government to create a society which is ultimately more fair because it guarantees freedom of choice, namely because the constitution which our Republic is based on grants us that freedom.

That is all well in good in theory, however, the problem exists that mass rule has inserted itself into our Republic when the Republicans figured out that pandering to the Christian’s in America would guarantee them a large percentage of the votes. In order to do that, they essentially imposed a set of standards dictated by the people they represent on top of our freedom of choice and therefore have instituted mass rule, instead of referring to the constitution which is pretty clear in its statement that freedom of choice applies to all American’s, not the moral majority. I could be wrong about this, but it’s quite a pickle from my point of view down here in the murk and grime of day to day American life.

Occupy The World: The Obligatory Welcome Story

Last Friday I sat in my office aiming to finish up a few tiny projects so I could prepare for a long 4 hour drive home. I’m in the process of relocating from Roanoke to the nation’s capital because the economy in the general area has fallen apart. A college degree is not a guarantee that you will get paid even the median salary for your profession or experience level, but it does guarantee a small mortgage of your soul and an interest rate high enough to ensure that the next 10 years of your life you’ll be living in a cheap apartment, despite making a solid middle class wage – even if it is on the lower side of middle class. None the less, the market may have crashed and the corporate world may be skimping on wages, but not in DC which somehow managed to be completely un-phased by the crisis that most of us paid dearly for in 2008. 

The only way one could dodge such a crisis was to be in the fortunate position to have nothing to begin with, which thankfully was a position I had a firm foothold on during the collapse. Needless to say you can’t lose much if you’re already scraping the bottom of the barrel. I guess if I could have gone any lower; there were plenty of foreclosures and not enough people buying, so I could have claimed squatting rights on a really nice place – at least until the market had bounced back – a day that’s still yet to come.

It was somewhere around 1PM when one of my colleagues knocked on my door, a short squat guy with African American qualities – most likely mixed. He’s a geek, much like me, which is a fortunate quality to have if you can manage to survive the entitlement program that most people call high school. He invites me to lunch with a few of the other guys at the office, a taller overweight gentleman who recently went to work in our accounting department, and another gentleman from Texas who simply referred to me by my stage name Dave Grohl. 

I don’t really know anyone where I am at yet, but the paychecks aren’t bad, so I figure I’ll stick with it a bit. If nothing else as another person traveling on this planet a few friends might be a good thing to have since I am firm in that decision. Despite my deadline, I indulge and we go to this burger joint not far from the office. 

The running joke around the area is that you’d be able to tell if the market ever did affect the DC area, because traffic would improve. A five mile drive can take an hour in this town during the peak of rush hour, but thankfully during lunch rush you can count on a conservative 30 minutes. My father lived in this area once and had called it the pulse of America. Based on the traffic conditions most days, if the roads were arteries, this place would be risking a triple bi-pass surgery and struggling on life support waiting for a transplant.

Conversations often turn political around me. My fiancée tells me often, that if there is one thing I am bad at its small talk, an allegation that I stand guilty as charged. Proof of this is the lack of dialog from the other side of the table, where I find myself dominating a conversation about the undue tax burden that state execution causes. Just a fun fact: California pays $300 million a year to house less than 15 death row in mates, which is at least 15 times what the rest of the prison system costs in that state for all other inmates. I thought I had a valid point. 

The ride back warmed a little, with more expression of personal politics as the Texan revealed himself to be a Libertarian and I was outted as a Liberal. One comment from the back seat went a little something like, “You sound like someone that should be in downtown D.C. protesting,” to which I jokingly replied,” I don’t believe in Communism,” a reference to a statement my father had made about the Occupy movement the night before.

Earlier in the year, probably drunk on a warm summer night, I engaged in a heated discussion on someone’s Facebook page after I saw a remarkably shortsighted post on President Obama and his inability to produce any plans that would help repair the economy, without running the deficit up even higher. The conversation was mostly dominated by Tea Party activists, a movement of which I have never been a fan. I posted a few views, of which earned scorn and derision, not uncommon when you’re a liberal with friends that align more with conservative, often paranoid points of view.

Naturally (if you know me at all anyways), this conversation turned to me light heartedly poking fun at Tea Partiers, by calling them Tea Baggers, which rumor has it is a name that the Tea Partiers started using to define them, obviously without consulting their 14 year old sons before assimilating under such a banner. Is it true? Maybe, but a good laugh is a good laugh and I can dish what I take. It’s probably asking too much that others do the same.

Many of my arguments were based on political figures that aligned themselves with Tea Party values, or supposed values, and perhaps some of the guys I was talking with are correct in saying that the media had a hand in connecting political figures ideals to the movement itself; however, I do contend that what the public sees the public tends to believe. When a face such as Michele Bachmann is synonymous with the Tea Party (especially given her track record of misrepresenting facts and dodging questions) I can see how some stomachs may have turned.

I remember suggesting the idea that a new movement of concerned citizens should be formed, one that is devoid of central leadership with no specific agenda. Later that night I watched a special comment by Keith Olbermann which mirrored that sentiment, and little did I know a great deal of American’s were planning on this exact idea albeit based on a suggestion coming from a source in Canada.

When I learned of the Occupy movement, I was astonished to find these principles existed, with people marching full steam ahead and was even more shocked when the movement grew, decentralized, with a single method of communication bringing people together to represent similar ideals. The Internet is a wonderful tool and if nothing else I can say I’m proud to see people using it to its greatest potential – a medium of organization. 

What does Occupy represent in my eyes? Simply, a group of concerned citizens who are tired of partisan politics, who are tired of good plans being ruined by pandering or the constant filibustering by Republicans, people who are sick of corporate greed, people who are even more tired of corporations posing as citizens while not being held accountable for their crimes in the same way any of us would be. A diversity of idea’s, a diversity of political affiliations, a diversity of religious ideals, but united by one idea; the system has failed.

A Thank you Letter to Terrorists (A Repost of my Sept. 11 Essay)

Show of hands, how many people are offended by the title alone? It's a rhetorical question, so please don't answer that. There isn't an American in the world that doesn't remember exactly where they were when they heard that some horrific tragedy happened in New York. I didn't quite understand it at the time, I woke up somewhere around 2 PM that afternoon, next to my girlfriend who I was helping move to a new apartment.

I was in her father's car, when someone turned on the radio, but no music. Only reporting about the trade centers falling, a plane crashing into the pentagon, and admittedly I wasn't awake enough to really comprehend everything I was hearing. A few hours later, it was clear to me what was going on. I turn on the TV and not a single station was not reporting on the crisis. Terrorist attacks...a guy name Bin Laden, a pile of rubble, who would have ever thought this would happen here?

The sleeping giant awoke...

It is common for those of us to honor the first responder, those that heroically charged into a tower in flames to save lives, and believe me they deserve our thanks. It is also common to thank the soldiers that fought the wars that would follow, some of which still are, and they definitely deserve respect. But the terrorist? Is there something we should thank them for? Did they, when they assaulted the freedom of 300 million American's, inadvertently do something that actually helped our country?

No doubt politically we are a divided nation. A session in congress these days looks like a messy celebrity divorce, one of which has become reality show of every major news network. There is not a news channel in the world that doesn't weigh in their opinion on some major crisis that our nation's leaders are divided on.  Once upon a time, only the politically devout understood what it meant to be on the left or right wing, but these days these are common buzz words in everyone's vocabulary.

We are a nation divided on everything, not because we don't agree on what the problems are (in most cases,) but because we don't agree on the solutions to the problems. In this day and age, not only does a solution have to be presented, but the other side of the fence must bow to other giving absolute control. Most of us stand somewhere in the middle, we subscribe to the hidden third party of this country, neither liberal nor conservative, but saying let's do what makes sense. It seems that a commitment to harmony and the struggle that exists to create that harmony just doesn't make good reality TV for the major news networks.

Christian? Muslim? Jew? Everyone has an opinion about that. Once again, a system is held hostage. It's not okay to just believe in a higher morality, which in my opinion God is supposed to represent, it also matters how you believe and should it not align with the moral majority, you don't belong.

But not today. This, one day out of the year, those things don't matter. For 24 hours our war against ourselves is suspended, because on 9/11 we were all in this together. Left, Right, it doesn't matter. We are united in mourning for those that died in 2001. We are in mourning for those that survived the loss of their husbands, wives, and children. We don't care what God you pray to, if you pray to one at all, nor do we care what book you get your religious facts from. Today we are united on one thing; that terrorists took the lives of nearly 3000 people. They didn't care what we believed in, just that we were Americans and we deserved to pay for whatever perceived atrocities we may have committed.

When those planes crashed into the towers, EMT's, Fire Fighter's, Police Officer's, regardless of their political affiliations, or religious convictions, just did their jobs, and many died for it. We have terrorists to thank for that, but we also have to look in the face of evil and say thank you. If you're still reading this in disbelief saying ," Who would possibly thank terrorists?" I would! Because today, for at least 24 hours, every American is united in a cause, and today the job will get done. Today, we recognize that a terrorist attack against American's, our political convictions, our religious beliefs, and our cultural difference don't matter. We are all American's, mourning for victims' of an atrocity committed by Middle Eastern terrorists, and as a result we recognize that we have 300 million brothers and sisters we must support.

If that message is not clear today, then I don't know what is. Today we are united and that message is what needs to permeate into tomorrow, and the day after that.

So at this time I would like to say: Thank you Osama Bin Laden. As a result of the terrorist attack that you orchestrated and executed 10 years ago today, we recognize the gift of a United nation, one that for 24 hours, at least, can put down their differences and be one. We recognize that the 3000 people you killed that day did not die for nothing, but to remind us that, no matter what, we are American and our enemy is you; a person who thought it appropriate to kill innocent people to make a point...whatever that point may have been. However, you have failed in making that point. As you lie dead somewhere in the Indian ocean, you should recognize that we are not afraid and that we stand, as one today, to mourn the people who have died and that shows the promise of a country that is still able to unite when it is necessary to stand and do right by all other Americans. Thank you, for reminding us of our strength, and why hate will never prevail.

Sincerely Yours,

Arriving Somewhere, but not Here