Tuesday I, along with several thousand fellow Adams Countians, made marks on paper indicating those people from whom we would like to hear more about why they should be placed at the head tables of our towns and county, and whether we thought a tax scheme being proposed was a good idea or not.
Tonight, I will accompany three of my Gettysburg Times colleagues to a banquet in Harrisburg. Some people who have been doing what we do, most of them longer than most of us, thought what we did was worth handing us plaques.
The two events are connected, I think — the ability to make choice about our government, and criticize or laud it as we think fit. So I thought I’d re-run the column from December which, along with one column about hunting, one about sports, and a picture about an anguished driver, will have four of us sitting among our peers and the aura or those who have preceded us.
Democracy, by definition, cannot be forced
I don’t know much about the Muslim religion, so I don’t fully understand why some women must wear veils and others not. Or why those who don’t feel so moved to change the way of those who do.
In college, we read and discussed Othello. That was the emperor’s favored general who killed his wife, who until the fateful night, loved him deeply, because her husband could not think ill of the man who stole her handkerchief, and chose instead to think she gave it willingly.
We got into a long and sometimes heated discussion about whether Desdemona could be — or should be — happy in the milieu of gender roles governing her life. Some students — mostly the younger ones — thought she should have left Othello rather than put up with his male-role ways of making love during brief periods home from making war.
What do you do with a guy who kills his wife because she’s too friendly with another guy? Most people would today vote for a very long jail term — or worse — but it wasn’t all that long ago it was legal in some states to shoot both the wife and the man with whom her husband caught her in bed. Infidelity was, and still is, grounds for divorce.
Interestingly, most divorce decrees these days are granted to the woman. And there still, in many courts across the land, a notion that no matter the other factors in the case, the mother still gets the kids.
Democracy as we would like to practice it is a wonderful concept. But going to another culture, removing its leader and pulling down a statue or two won’t make it happen. Trying to force other people to switch their religious beliefs will not be met with glorious halleluiahs.
In 1965, Pope John XXIII allowed the Roman Catholic church to celebrate Mass “in the vernacular;” the congregation could hear and recite the prayers in their own language, instead of Latin, which few people understood. My father-in-law changed his Sunday morning habits to attend the Mass spoken in Latin.
I was raised in a town established by two brothers who, after providing significant aid to the rebels winning the American Revolutionary War, were forced to gather their families and possessions and leave their home on Martha’s Vineyard — at the time not exactly a hotbed of revolutionary zeal.
But we won our freedom because sufficient numbers of us wanted it; because although we did not know exactly how we wanted to be governed, we knew we had left the way we did not want to be governed; and because the force trying to stop our rebellious ways was not being reinforced from adjacent nations.
None of that seems to apply in the Middle East, where nations deal with each other like siblings who argue and fight among themselves, but stand together against outside interference.
It really doesn’t matter why we change our manner of trying to force democracy on Iraq. It does not matter whether our president credits someone other than himself for the new ideas. It only matters that we recognize our job should be to help the Iraqis build the government they want, even if it is not precisely what we want.
In the end, that’s what democracy is about.
© 2007. Readers may contact John by email at jmesseder@comcast.net.
I would like to see a continuation of the topic