Twenty-two Minutes of Democracy

By David Geiger, July 28, 2023

Twenty-two Minutes of Democracy

Draft – July 28, 2023 ©David Geiger 2023

Democracy is a slippery thing. Try to hold on to it, try to get your arms around it, and it squishes and squeezes into new shapes and forms. Democracy is certainly defined and discussed and debated to no end – but that’s not actual democracy in action. Democracy is the people, you and I, taking some action or making a decision, and the actual thing “democracy” only really exists in our minds. All the talk around politics, whether from a reliable, honest source are not, does influence democracy. It influences what people do in their voting sessions – after that their role is basically over, at least that of the average person in the USA.

Capitalism, communism, socialism, are all squishy too, but they are not competitors to democracy. Democracy can work with any economic system. There are many places on Earth where varying degrees of each exist alongside democracy.

I was born in 1958, in November, after the elections were complete, so I just missed the 1976 elections. I voted for the first time in 1980. Since them l have voted in most of the presidential and midterm elections. So, at a minute for each trip into the tollbooth, that’s 22 minutes where I gave my choice and presumably was heard. Except of course the 2000 election where my choice was discarded.

My vote, as critical as it may be to democracy, was still only one vote among 158,000,000 other votes in the 2020 presidential election. My contribution to democracy is .000000006% of the total. It takes me about one minute to cast my vote in the ballot box.

Each time in the polling booth I was practicing democracy. I was delivering my choices over to the government, expressing my preferences for the person I wanted for a leader. There is no doubt, I was voting, and I respect voting and how it is part of the integrity and infrastructure of the US.

So in total, in my almost 65 years of life, I have spent 22 minutes actively engaged in a democratic activity – voting. There must be more, I thought and began searching. I watch the news and follow the process of selecting candidates for the democratic and republicans parties. I watch and read discussions of what other people think of candidates, elections, policies, and sex scandals. For the most part this seems to me to be more like gossiping than about democracy. Especially when so many of the sources out there to all of us do not even attempt to be journalistic or make any attempt at objectivity.

I found out early on that if I didn’t register as either a democrat or republican I would not receive any info on the process of slimming down the field to two candidates for President. Sure there are other parties but they don’t have (or usually need) primary elections to narrow down the field. So until I registered for one of the two major parties I did not participate in the early selection process. I went into the ballot box with two names to choose from, or a host of other contenders who have a message, but not a chance of winning.

One vote, one decision. Blue or Red. That’s it.

So if I did not register to be a part of one of the parties, I have no democratic role at all until the parties narrow down their candidate to one each.

I am still at 22 minutes total. I must push aside the things I am not a part, and except for those 18 minutes, there is only chatter and chirping and squawking like chickens in a frenzy.

What if I look outside politics? I’ve worked at dozens of different companies as a consultant and I can say with certainty, none of them had anything resembling democracy. Each had a titular leader, who oversaw another layer of leaders and this cascaded throughout each organization. The titular leader, while being the autocrat with the power to do almost anything wanted with the company, there is a more supreme level of control, the owners. In the end, the company will do what the owners want.

No democracy there! So I looked elsewhere – barber shop, nail place, restaurants, churches, schools, mortgage company, gas station….the only thing I came up with is Alcoholics Anonymous, although I am not sure if maybe this guy Bill W. Is running things l over there.

Another possibility is homeowner associations. My experience with them is that they follow and enforce the rules set out when the organization was formed.

I looked closer at schools and sports – still looking for democracy. I can’t think of a single sports team that is run democratically in the administrations, or on the field or court. All authoritarian dictators like everywhere else. Sure there may be benevolent authoritarian dictators, but that’s also true of dictatorships around the world.

What about our military, made up of our citizens to fight for our safety? I could not find any democracy there either, in fact they have a very strict authoritarian structure. The military has a supreme commander whose orders must be obeyed. That is one of the two candidates chosen during my 22 minutes of active democracy.

So in this country that is so proud of democracy, why is there so little democracy?

The common almost universal answer I get at the suggestion of, say, running a country or a football team, a bagel shop or a dry cleaner is this: “that would never work! It would be chaos! Nothing would get done!” If you want something to get done, they say, “you need to have a leader who gets things done, workers need to follow orders and directives or be dismissed from the organization.

More to come – I am still searching! Have ideas – send them to me at me@davidgeiger.blog.

David

July 28, 2023