DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE WITH DEMOCRACY AND THREE URGENT PLEAS
World NewsApr 27, 2011
DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE WITH DEMOCRACY AND THREE URGENT PLEAS
Sheila Parks, Ed.D.
Democracy. Who used to have it in the USA, and who has it now? People with white skin privilege? People who were born male? People with piles of money, much of it stolen from other people’s labor?
I often hear European Americans from all walks of life talking about democracy in the USA – how they want to reclaim it, like in the good old days – and I wonder about how differently from one another we experience this country. This is not our land; not my land nor your land. When European Americans arrived over 500 years ago, we murdered with bullets and small pox blankets – that we intentionally gave to them – the Indigenous people who had lived in balance here for thousands of years. Then we enslaved people of African descent to build the country’s wealth, and kept women – who did not even get the vote until 1920 – second class citizens and the property of men for even longer.
The United States government is not a shining light. We never have been, and we are not now. While it was never really good for too many people, what has changed here in the USA is that it has gotten worse, not better. Our own elections system is now a corporate-controlled charade, with big money pulling all the strings and using electronic voting machines to rig the