Jenifer’s Shelter Island Journal: Pax Romana
With mail-in and early voting, the die is already being cast even as you’re reading this, though Election Day is still more than a week away. And though the opposing sides are still labeled with the quaintly familiar “Republicans” and “Democrats,” not since the Civil War have the real adversaries been “Democracy” vs. “Not-Democracy” — a pitched battle more existential than political.
The fact is, what we may consider democracy today, is a form of government where rich or poor, powerful or weak are supposed to be seen as equal under the law.
It’s probably not quite what John Locke had in mind, nor did the Founding Fathers he influenced, in spite of the fact that the following is included in the second paragraph of the United States Declaration of Independence. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…”
Even in the Declaration, they didn’t say “people,” they said Men and clearly they didn’t mean all men, just wealthy, land-owning, often slave-holding white men like themselves. But the thing is, just the core concept that commoners, men of low birth could be seen as equal to royalty in any kind of way was just an outrageous, gob-smacking idea, especially considering that over the course of human history, the hallmark of the species has been the enforcement of the duality between the unfettered power of a few and the abject subjugation of everybody else.
That’s how we humans seem to roll. The merest suggestion of equality being deliberately sought between classes, races, or genders on any level has, since time immemorial, been regarded as unseemly and unnatural, not to mention completely unnecessary. Thus laws have been codified across time and cultures to protect the species from such blasphemy.
Therefore, that the tiniest germ of this insane notion of human equality should be somehow adopted by our Founding Fathers as a seminal pillar of the new nation they were envisioning should have been far less likely than pigs flying.
And yet, maybe because they only co-opted a sliver of it for purposes of their own financial gain, it managed to slip into the DNA of this embryonic nation, along with slavery, of course, but if they’d attempted to install “equality” with all of its transformative implications from the get-go, the idea would’ve been laughed out of the stifling hall of the second Continental Congress and into oblivion.
Yet, no matter how truncated and misappropriated that tiny notion was, it ignited fires in the hearts and minds of poor, disenfranchised and enslaved people all over the world. And, sure enough, as the nation grew, many Americans believed their own national advertising, mistaking the “American Dream” for reality.
But in this, our late adolescence, the collective hypocrisy that had allowed some of us to feel exceptional in spite of the glaring contradictions that flash at us like neon, is now impossible to ignore. The blinders are off. It’s taken the seismic upheaval of the last nearly a decade to do it, but they’re off. And jolted out of our complacency, half of us are stunned that what we thought was the eternal, forever-flowering “greatest democracy on earth” is suddenly hanging on the ropes.
The other half of us, those of us who never really bought this equality-for-all gambit, knew that there was no such thing — wasn’t supposed to be because that sham-equality has permitted all sorts of perversions that go against the age-old, divinely decreed order of things.
Yet, I’ve had this romantic notion that our young nation, having gone through a golden childhood and a hair-raising adolescence, including this present soul-shaking identity crisis, is finally ready to come of age and face our many flaws, recommit ourselves to striving for ‘a more perfect [more equal] union,’ and take responsibility for the care and feeding of this “experiment,” this accidental miracle that is our democracy, so we can finally grow it into the American reality.
Or not.
Because, for better or worse, this is a democracy, after all, and it’s entirely possible that we’ll all wake up on (or about) Nov. 6 and find that the Rubicon has been crossed and we have voted democracy out, that enough of us have apparently felt so aggrieved, so burdened, so victimized by our present system that they have opted for … something else.
I venture to say that in that case, even they won’t be sure of what they’ve voted in.