Tag Archives: democracy

VOTE! (A mostly non-partisan message)

I don’t have a big interest in politics, but from the time I’ve been old enough to vote, I have. The way I see it this is a civic duty and also the privilege of living in a democracy. Going back in my blog, I think I mention the message that it’s your duty to vote every election, and I make the message completely non-partisan each time. My party of choice might not win, but if everyone voted, then I would be happy with the result. However, when only a small percentage of people vote, then it can be easy for a loud but fringe group to end up getting a powerful position, and that upsets me.

So leading up to the municipal vote today, I shared the following message on Facebook and Twitter:

This ParentsVoice BC group vying for School Board Trustee positions is disturbing enough to me that I’m breaking my non-partisan voice. My message isn’t to tell you who you should vote for, just not to vote for them. In a society where everyone had to vote, I would not be concerned about them, but they will probably have supporters who are more likely to vote than other candidates have. And when under 40% of the population votes, each fringe vote is worth at least 2.5 votes worth of the entire pool of eligible voters. With many other candidates splitting the other votes and this cohort (3 in my municipality) are each getting votes from every one of their supporters, suddenly this fringe group has a chance at taking 3 out the 4 possible seats in the election.

So my message is that when a fringe group with close-minded ideas has a chance at an election, then it matters to voice concerns against them. It matters that they aren’t the loudest voices in a popularity contest. It matters that everyone votes… Not necessarily for the same candidates as me, just not for them. If enough people do that, they will be a minority, and they will not have the opportunity to influence the majority.

So for those of you in BC, Canada, take a bit of time out of your day today and VOTE!

Profit and greed

Watching the price of gas top $2.30 a litre and knowing that big oil companies are making billions in profit is maddening. Never waste a good crisis. Now don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with a company taking profits, but I really wonder where the world is headed when company shareholders care more about increasing profit than anything else.

I think too many people confuse democracy and capitalism. They think a free world should include unfettered opportunities for business and profit. But a model where corporate value is tied to how much returns shareholders can get for their investment is not designed to make the world better or more free. It’s designed to put more wealth into the hands of the rich, who can afford to buy stocks and shares in companies.

Greed is the underlying driver of such a system. Not democracy, not freedom, greed.

‘This approach isn’t as good for the environment, but it is more profitable.’

‘We could pay our employees a better living wage, but that would hurt our profits.’

‘If we lay people off and increase efficiency, we can meet our targets and get our bonuses.’

There are stories like this one, where a boss decided that every employee will get at least 70k a year, and the company is still thriving 5 years later. And there is a local company run by Paul Macdonald that donates 50% of corporate profits to charity.

But these stories are anomalies. They shouldn’t be. There shouldn’t be a reason that the world we live in is driven by profit and greed. I hope to see more people doing what these guys are doing. They are earning a good living, and making the world around them better. That shouldn’t be a novel idea, it should be what drives us.

A socialist democracy

I think I’ve missed voting in one local election since I became voting age. We went on holiday and I neglected to vote early. Other than that one mistake, I’ve always seen it as my civic duty to vote. I’m in favour of giving every voting age citizen a tax break if they vote, promoting full civic participation.

Here in Canada we are a socialist democracy, especially compared to the US. I watched a news clip yesterday and a rather conservative US reporter was equating social democracy to stealing tax money from the middle class to support the poor. Then I saw a Tiktok that quoted the article ‘Three Cheers for Socialism‘, and I thought this quote was very interesting:

“Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth. They know next to nothing as a rule about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know little or nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words like “socialism” and “capitalism.” Chiefly, what they have been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state, than do the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic institutions. This is at once the most comic and most tragic aspect of the excitable alarm that talk of social democracy or democratic socialism can elicit on these shores. An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded to believe that they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete. They are far more vulnerable to medical and financial crisis, far more likely to receive inadequate health coverage, far more prone to irreparable insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory creditors, far more subject to income inequality, and so forth, while effectively paying more in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local, and sales taxes, and then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this country, as almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover). One might think that a people who once rebelled against the mightiest empire on earth on the principle of no taxation without representation would not meekly accept taxation without adequate government services. But we accept what we have become used to, I suppose. Even so, one has to ask, what state apparatus in the “free” world could be more powerful and tyrannical than the one that taxes its citizens while providing no substantial civic benefits in return, solely in order to enrich a piratically overinflated military-industrial complex and to ease the tax burdens of the immensely wealthy?”

Wow.

I don’t think Canada has the correct mix of social democratic policies, but I think that we better understand how a wide social net protects those that need protection, and lifts our entire society as a whole… as compared to the US, but not compared to some European countries. Lessons can be learned from other countries, but I fear that US political and news influences are misleading about terms like socialist democracy, and it’s easy to get lost in what is essentially propaganda.

I’m back to thinking about the blind man analogy, and wondering how we can create a vision for democracy in the future that is more all encompassing, that is less capitalist and more socialist? The true lessons of capitalism as I see them aren’t to maximize growth of wealth, but to create competitive cost efficiencies that reduce costs for public good. Bloated social programs that cost too much hurt us all. This is where the lessons in the business world can help with the public good.

But to many the perception of a socialist democracy is a step towards communism. It’s a step towards giving up freedom to a more controlling state. It’s the start of the collapse of a capitalism… It’s actually more like the collapse of exploitation of the vast majority of the working class, but that’s not the narrative. I fear that the narratives we are exposed to are convincing more and more people that capitalism and democracy share the same principles, they don’t. A true democracy is a government chosen by the people for the people… not corporations.

Binge watching

Every extended break I end up doing this: I pick a series and binge watch a few seasons over a few days. I watch so little television of any kind regularly, that there is always something to catch up on. My wife totally sunk into The Handmaids Tale a while back and told me I’d love it. So here I am approaching the end of Season 2, her watching it again with me, and saying ‘One more’ after already watching two episodes in a sitting.

Margaret Atwood is a brilliant writer, and the series is very well done. I remember seeing her say in a video that she didn’t put anything into Handmaid’s Tale that wasn’t something that had already happened somewhere in the world. If I was watching this series in 2019, I would have thought less about this fact, but somehow 2020 has made me see the world quite differently.

Today I’m more keenly aware that fascism can rear its ugly head. I’m more keenly aware of how religious beliefs can be argued and leveraged to reduce non-believer’s choices. I am more keenly aware of how information can be misconstrued and manipulated to fool a large percentage of the population.

We live in a world where rulers can still rule for their lifetime; Where religious and cultural genocide happen; Where rights to basic food and healthcare are dependent on geography and luck of being born to parents who can support a child’s needs. This is a not a just and free world for many, and that can lead to unrest. It can lead to upheaval, and it can spark less democratic and more totalitarian regimes. Regimes that, while not necessarily similar to Handmaids Tale, can be quite scary.

On that solemn and dark thought… my wife wants to watch another episode, and I’m quite willing to partake.

Working through our differences

Let’s play a little game of ‘Have you ever?’ It’s a quiet game that you play inside your head, no one but you needs to know your answers:

Have you ever planned to buy something locally (at a farmer’s market or local lumber store or specialty shop) and then when you saw the price you decided to go to the cheaper big chain or online store?

Have you ever lied to someone because the truth was too hard to tell?

Have you ever done anything that went against your religious or core beliefs, knowing it was wrong, but you did it anyway?

Have you ever chosen to make sacrifices in order to align more with your religious or core beliefs, even though you’d rather not make those sacrifices?

Have you ever done something not because you wanted to, but because you feared other options or outcomes?

Have you ever looked at people different than you and unfairly judged them (regardless of whether you felt justified or you realized you made a mistake later)?

Have you ever made a decision that was not based on what you really wanted, but on what was in your opinion the lesser evil?

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We all make compromises. We all make choices that do not align perfectly with our values and/or we all make sacrifices because they do align with those values. We are not perfect. We don’t always make perfect choices.

We can and do hold different values than other people. And while we can hold other people accountable for doing unjust things that harm us or others, we should not judge another for simply making decisions we would not make. We don’t always know what drives others to those decisions, what personal compromises they had to make, what values they chose to focus on or to ignore. We can challenge ideas, but we do not gain anything from the judgement of others simply because they made choices we would not make.

“Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.” Edmund Burke

We live in a pluralistic society. In such a society we will have neighbours with different values than us. We can not both celebrate their differences and also judge our neighbours for not thinking the same as us. A fair and just society relies on us working through our differences, not condemning others for being different.

A house divided

You don’t have to be American to know that the election today is one that matters significantly to a lot of people in the USA, and across the world.

Abraham Lincoln said, “A house divided against itself, cannot stand.”

I am not aware of any democratic nation that has stood so divided? Twice.

I hope the foundation of American democracy can peacefully withstand the results of today and the coming months. I do not believe a new house can be easy built if this one crumbles.

It wouldn’t surprise me

I find it mind boggling that a day before the presidential election south of our border, I would not be surprised if I hear about bloodshed on Election Day. It wouldn’t surprise me to see partisan violence causing death in a open, democratic society, in the country touted as a symbol of freedom. How sad is that?

The FBI is investigating a Friday incident in Hays County, Texas, where a group of Trump supporters in trucks surrounded and followed a Biden campaign bus on I-35.1 At least one minor collision can be seen in footage of the incident. Texas Democrats canceled three scheduled events on Friday, citing “safety concerns.” Trump tweeted a video of the incident with the caption, “I LOVE TEXAS.”2 (Source)

When I read something like this, and see that the US president condones rather than criticizes the behaviour, I’m just flabbergasted! It’s like a principal of a school publicly congratulating a school yard bully. What behaviours can you expect to happen on the school yard after that?

How did we get here? What will the cost be tomorrow? Will people lose their lives trying to exercise their right to vote… in the USA… in 2020?

I really hope not, but at this point in time I wouldn’t bet against it. It just wouldn’t surprise me, and I find that very, very sad.

When you live in a democracy… VOTE

I’d like to say 2 things to my BC and American friends:

1. Vote

2. This is your civic duty.

It always amazes me how many people choose not to vote in an election.

“We do not have government by the majority. We have government by the majority who participate.” – Thomas Jefferson

Poor excuses not to vote:

“My vote doesn’t matter.”

“No politician deserves my vote.”

“They are all the same.”

“The candidate I like will win/lose no matter if I vote or not.”

“One vote doesn’t make a difference.”

Two reasons to vote:

  • You have the right to do something others have died for in our countries, and will die for in other countries.
  • You squander your civic duty when you don’t.

So do your civic duty… VOTE.

Voting in a democracy

How many people have died, fighting either to earn the opportunity to vote, or to keep the freedom to participate in a free and open society? Yet many individuals in free and democratic societies don’t make the effort to exercise their right… their duty, to vote. It amazes me. It baffles me.

Even if you don’t think your vote will make a difference. Even if you feel you have to choose the lesser evil because you are not a fan of any candidate or party. Even if you aren’t passionate about any of the party platforms… you have the opportunity to contribute to a process that makes your life better than if you didn’t have that opportunity at all.

Voting in a democracy should be like renewing your driver’s licence… something you have to do every few years. If you don’t vote, you should have to pay a penalty when you pay taxes. But more than that, it should be something you want to do; to participate in a free and open society. It should be a duty you want to perform.

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Upcoming elections: With Covid-19, there are more options to vote than just in person on Election Day. Your options can including voting early, and/or by mail, but this requires action before Election Day… so register now!

BC, Canada Provincial Election – October 24th 2020: Online Voter Registration

US Federal Election – November 3rd, 2020: I Will Vote

Vote. It matters!

Today is Election Day in Canada. 🇨🇦

I’ve already written that ‘Voting is a civic duty‘.

Now it is up to you! Every vote matters. It matters not because your one single vote is likely to make a difference. It matters because living in a democracy matters. Freedom matters. The opportunity to vote matters.

…And if it matters, then do your part.

Vote!