Democracy: It Was Never Supposed to Be Easy

William Rivers Pitt has a fine essay in Truthout. This how it begins:

Any starting point requires that we remember that this nation which birthed us, inspires us, blesses us, puts us to work, this nation that challenged us to remember the original promises whenever we said the Pledge of Allegiance all those times in school, this nation we'd all die for, this nation we call home is, in the end, nothing more or less than an idea.

An idea. A dream, an experiment, something sociologist Max Weber once described as "the slow boring of hard boards," a serious endeavor with a good chance of success but a better chance of failure, and if the one was to be saved from the other, there would have to be a lot of good will and hard work and devotion to the premises that got everything started in the first place. The lady who asked Benjamin Franklin what had been wrought after the Constitutional Convention of 1787 got the right answer. "A republic," Franklin told her, "if you can keep it."

"We the people" was a good start, if we're talking about the premises. No one had ever before, in all of history, bothered to lay down a national charter with that kind of thinking in mind. "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" was another original stroke. There were a dozen more at least, ideas that have been around since time out of mind to be sure, but ideas that no one anywhere ever used collectively and comprehensively to define the reasons for a diverse people to stand under one flag and salute, and mean it.

It was supposed to be a lot of things, but it was never supposed to be easy.

The rest is well worth reading though there are places that are more cynical than they should be and maybe a place or two I don't fully agree with. But if you have an open mind, read all the way to the end. For one moment, even I got a little more cynical than usual even though I too believe there are ideas worth working for, day in and day out and year after year. Here's the brief passage in Pitt's essay where I wish a simple but brutal metaphor had been used because there are times when it has been true:

Foreign policy decisions these days amount to little more than business deals writ large and with body counts to boot, but the latter is always folded in somewhere beneath the bottom line.

It has been shown that the body counts and a lot of other things Americans need to know are sometimes buried in the back, in fine print, in the footnotes. Like many other Americans who have been scratching the surface, I too have seen some of the reports.

Whether the Democrats come back in 2006 or 2008 or 2010 or 2012 or some third party of progressives come in after that, I plan to be around. Doing what's right is not supposed to be easy.