I know that people are tired of the overheated rhetoric comparing Scott Walker; the month and a half, budget-balancing, union-busting Governor of Wisconsin, and Col. Moammar Gaddafi, 41 year long, murderous tyrant of Libya.
There is no moral equivalent between Governor Walker’s attempt to strip some state workers of their rights to collective organizing through the passage of a law banning unions and Gaddafi’s horrendous, bloody, mass-murder of protestors.
These two men do not share tactics (although a prank caller to Walker did illicit the promised use of a baseball bat against his detractors). Their means are different, but any one who prizes democracy should be worried about their shared ends: to systematically silence their opposition.
Democracy is often talked about as an individual right, as in “one-person one-vote.”
Voting is not an easy practice. If you take your duty seriously, then you have to broadly research candidates and issues in order to decide our vote.
Democracy is a complex social system and it needs more than this one dimensional expression to stand up and include every voice.
Democracy also needs all of the participants to have some sense that we are “all in this together.”
Often times, we are not given the option to vote in issues that we care about because they only effect a small group of people.
For issues that effect marginalized people, like the homeless or the hungry, a democratic people also express their concern for others and our democratic system by volunteering to address these social problems.
Community service is the height of expression for our democratic system.
A two dimensional system cannot stand on its own either.
Organizing is the essential, third-dimension of a self-sustaining democracy.
It is in this deep dimension that a people can set the agenda that is ignored by those in power.
Organizing with others who are disregarded makes the “freedom of expression” audible.
It was organizing that foisted the agenda of African-Americans who were dehumanized by segregation and institutional inequality into our nation’s politics.
Workers organized themselves into unions when they were were suffering and dieing at the hands of greedy employers in the 1930’s. Their organizing created the 8 hour work day and end ended child labor.
Women organized to win voting rights in the 1920’s.
Gay, lesbian and bi-sexual people organized to eliminate discrimination in the US military in 2010 and may have erased it from the state institution of marriage in the last few days.
All of these groups and thousands more have used organizing to make the harm that they were suffering quietly as individuals into national issues.
Though Gov. Walker and and Col. Gaddifi do not share the same bloody tactics, they do share the same goal: prevent the united masses from being able to organize.
History shows us that those who prevent or repress a peoples ability to unite around their shared interests or grievances will topple.
All democracy loving people should be revolted at the violence in Libya. This violence will mark Col. Moammar Gaddafi as an evil despot in history forever.
We should all hope that he will soon be removed with more humanity than he has afford his enemies.
Those who he destroyed may some day be remembered and revered as heroes for the sacrifice that they had to make to stand up for some level of freedom through the democratic expression of organizing in the streets, like the heroes of our nation from the time that they overthrew British subjugation to those that defeated discrimination of all kinds since.
As the rights of workers is under attack in Wisconsin, we all have the chance to be heroes too. Take a stand and defend their right, and the rights of us all in a democracy to organize.
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