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...desire for a leader, a Man (or Woman) on a White Horse, a Knight in Shining Armor, who will battle the Dark Lords and save us, or, barring that, an amazing event--such as an election fraud whistleblower coming forward--that will change everything ("proof!"); or, a major newspaper actually doing its job and investigating and exposing the election; or, or, or...
...something or someone other than ourselves rescuing us.
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"And do not look outside yourself for the leader."
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How many posts have we seen here, trashing John Kerry because he WASN'T a White Knight, hoping that John Conyers or Barbara Boxer WILL BE our White Knight; fussing and whining over our corrupt, collusive or clueless leaders in every jurisdiction (I'm guilty of it, too); or wanting great drama and headlines and court convictions to somehow solve the problem that we have lost control of OUR democracy.
Not that we shouldn't criticize our leaders. Of course we should. But execrating them as cowardly and/or as having "abandoned" us means that we are mistakenly relying on THEIR courage, and THEIR patriarchal protection, to make things right for us all.
It's OUR democracy. We must own it. We must see that it works for the benefit of all. If the last four and half years (or indeed the last several decades) have shown us nothing else, it is that we cannot take our democracy for granted any longer. No one can BE our democracy for us. We must BE the democracy that we desire to have. We must live it every day. It is up to us to CREATE it. No one in power will do that for us.
Part of the problem of this election fraud is that Americans HAVE taken democracy for granted, have not participated, and have relied on leaders to do the right thing. (Thomas Jefferson would be aghast! Leaders doing the right thing? Ha! Be vigilant, citizens! Be ever on your guard against tyranny!). Thus, we ALLOWED our government to install a wholly non-transparent election system that cannot verify who was elected president--and that is easily manipulable, and controlled by Bush Republicans!
Democracy is a collective effort, grounded in a collective consciousness, each of us doing our part, and each of us vitally important to the whole. That is its premise. We are in the process of rediscovering what democracy really means, that leaders are the expressions of the collective will, not its dictators (nor White Knights), and that the foundation of every power and every decision is the SOVEREIGN CITIZENRY, not the leaders.
This is a hard thing to grasp hold of, in our current situation--our leaders have gotten so out of control. But it is not a matter of having better leaders. It's a matter of restoring the rightful premise of our democracy: citizen education, citizen action, citizen control, and our collective exercise of our sovereignty.
Each one important. Each one doing their part. And no great burden of power or decision or action falling on any one person (and thus no great temptation to abuse of power).
That process of recovering our democracy started before the election, in a wondrous, new grass roots democracy movement that elected John Kerry president. The election fraud was a severe blow to that movement, as it was meant to be. But there are signs that that movement is putting itself back together.
Those of us in the older age brackets (and those who study history) can see the erosion of our democracy occurring over time. It didn't happen overnight. And it's not going to be restored by us overnight. But it is indeed a "river"--the Hopis metaphor--a natural force within human consciousness, a deep hunger for fairness and justice, that cannot be stopped. And it is rippling throughout the whole world right now. We are the anomaly--the U.S.--we are the people clinging to the shore of old institutions and power arrangements that are simply not working any more, and also clinging (some of us) to our economic and weapons powers, as if they could protect us and our democracy from a trashed and a chaotic planet that those very economic and weapons powers are creating.
What I see is that democracy did not really succeed in the United States over the long haul. Part of why it did not succeed was the development of atomic weapons, which gave the president the power of life and death over billions of people, at the touch of a button. The president thereafter became not just a king, not just an emperor, but a God--and we surround him with protection and pomp and untouchability and reverence, just as if he were a God.
JFK's assassination back in 1964, was a blow to our belief in our God's immortality, more even than a political event--a blow from which many of us have not yet recovered, emotionally. We are repeating some old human patterns here. Now the rightwing worships Bush in the same way (if not with the same justification--I mean, Kennedy was more worthy by far). But why should that have been such a blow--in a democracy?
Cause for sadness, yes (and certainly for investigation!--don't get me started). But a blow of such great magnitude that most Americans who lived through it can still remember every detail of where they were, and what they were doing, at that moment? A blow so great that many feel that our democracy ended that day?
I mean, JFK almost didn't win the 1960 election (and some say he won it by election fraud!). He was quite popular and refreshing and new, and had a great many rivetting things to say (and did some great things). But he was just a president, just a man filling an office. Our government went on--the office was filled again--but the heart of our democracy stopped beating that day, many feel.
It was a huge trauma. Why? Because many loved him? Because he was admirable? Because he was so young, and especially loved by the young? Nope. I think it was because that shouldn't happen to the God of our Nation, the man who could annihilate us all, and the entire planet, on a whim, at the push of a button, and by whose grace --wisdom, beneficence, magnanimity--we are all allowed to live.
(I suppose there is another way to look at this: That democracy was foiled by the assassins--and THAT'S why people were so traumatized by it. We weren't a country where that kind of thing happened very often. We were a stable, prosperous democracy. We didn't have serial killers, and random mass murders, and unglued CIA assets back then--not within country anyway. It was a very uncommon event in the U.S. But I don't think the magnitude of that shock can be accounted for on such reasonable grounds. Something more was at work. Worship of a young monarch, at the very least. Maybe I go too far by saying it was an assassination of a God. Still, you can't deny the power of that individual, the president, over all mankind--the power of a God--and it shook us to our foundation that the individual in whom we had invested this Godlike power could be so vulnerable. And we have since surrounded the president with protection far beyond the protection that any emperor has ever received.)
Leader worship has always been a snag in our democracy. (Ask George Washington, whom some people wanted to crown as a king.) But not until the mid-20th Century, and 1945 to be exact, did it become a major problem, eating away at the heart of democracy.
Now we have people who think that the government is innocent until proven guilty (of election fraud, for instance). (Our Founders would be appalled--they all knew that government is guilty until proven innocent--that's why they hacked up its powers into different branches, and tried to insure a free press.)
In any case, we do not have a democracy any more, in my opinion, and we have a long way to go to get it back. It's been a long time in the losing. This totally non-transparent election was the coup de grace. (Wally O'Dell counting all our votes with secret, proprietary programming code--I mean, come on.)
And it's up to us--all living Americans--to recover this great legacy that was ours, and pass it along to the future.
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"We are the ones we have been waiting for."
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