I have been meaning to start this for a while. But then something new appears over the horizon, I await the outcome, and then sit down to start again.
And then another, and another.
So, time to put it out there before I get sidetracked again.
Each new iteration of the national or international leadership posturing has convinced me over and over that there is no point. There is no point in voting. There is no point in expecting that vote to be respected.
Wherever you look, those put in power by our, or some of our, votes blithely abuse the privilege we give them to serve their own particular agenda. Or in some cases, their bloated and uncaring egos.
And in the bedrock of modern representative democracy, yep that is what we are told, the leadership of the country is as bad as the most reviled and despotic dictatorship.
Our democratic structure has been exported, or more accurately imposed through colonisation, on a good proportion of the globe. Each nation has adjusted and adapted it to suit their particular wants and needs.
Or rather, the ruling power brokers have done so. And they have placated the masses with the illusion of representation. But that only happens within the construct that is already in place. And that can, and does, severely restrict any validity the principle may have held.
But we all blindly accept the concept. We vote. They win. They work for us.
The actuality? We vote. The winners, put there by a minority of the population, will work for those who put them there, or more precisely a small percentage of those who gave them the power.
There will be platitudes about representing all, but I am yet to see any substantial evidence of that.
To be given the power is to be presented with a license to play games with people’s lives, with regard only for those that will sustain the hold on power. The term public servant is a myth, and that bubble burst long ago.
There has been a gradual change from paternalistic power abuse to blatant, and as that transition has occurred, what honour there was has disappeared too.
Even honour among thieves no longer exists, and when that happens, the ripples that flow out from the internal back-stabbing have even more profound and terrible effects on the masses of us.
So we turn on each other, through blame around like rice at a wedding, and lose faith in everything that is supposed to be the bulwark against chaos.
Now, there used to be a defense, of sorts, against the excesses of the abuse of power. And that was the media. Or, more specifically, elements of the print media, and the BBC.
As the internet has eclipsed the printed word, and the news has become more of a bullet point than a paragraph, that defense has largely evaporated. There are flashes, there are moments when the indignation gets toa pitch that it cannot be ignored, but they are few and far apart.
I will give an example.
There has been of late of a lot of public activity, outcry and general gesticulating regarding allegations of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, and in particular the less than rapid response of Jeremy Corbyn.
First of all, yes there are anti-semitic members of the Labour Party. And yes, the response has not been as publicly speedy as would have been hoped for.
And because of that, the media is justified to ask what is being done, and why things are seemingly moving so slowly.
However, there are a few points they have overlooked, points that would have been standard media research points a few years ago.
Firstly, if there are anti-semitic elements in the Labour Party, should they not look at the other main political parties as a comparison. A recent poll did, and found that there are significantly more clear examples of anti-Semitism in the Tory ranks. And the media said …. nothing.
They made much of Corbyn attending a Seder supper put on by a ‘left-wing’ Jewish group – historically a stalwart element of the founding and development of the socialist movement and therefore the Labour Party ( apologies for the s word, frowned on these days I know) – but only mentioned once, in passing, that there were representatives of all factions and religious strata of the Jewish community. This then disappeared under the weight of the media-driven indignation.
If we want democracy, or at least a form of it that offers some respite from the excesses of factional extremists, then we need to regain a media that writes sentences and paragraphs, not soundbites to gain sales.
And that means we need to stop and think. We need to question, and listen to the answer. Not demand every question is answered within the space of a tweet. Accept that most of life is complicated, and inter-connected.
There are only one kind of simple answer. And they are the wrong ones.
The nuances, balanced, cooperative compromise is the acceptable alternative.
Once we see that, then we can force those who claim to uphold democracy to answer in the same way.
Then maybe we can move forward. Not down.
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