NOTE: What follows was originally published (23 Nov 05, with no expiry date) on the iNoodle.com blog ( http://iNoodle.com/blog.html). Please consider linking directly to the blog so that you may access the relevant links, and participate in the discussion.

You may also link directly to the below post, specifically, via the following URL:
 http://inoodle.com/2005/11/worldwide-call-for-inputwhat-is-to-be.html
________________

I have been remiss in a particular obligation: getting back, as promised, to Turbulent Cleric concerning his critically important question, as follows from an excerpt of his November 8th comment posted in response to my article of the same date:

I agree that our democracies fall far short of what democracy should be. There is a growth of alienation as the political class seems to be both removed and manipulative. […]

The big question is how we can develop a form of people power to save us from the false choices we are offered.

Turbulent Cleric—who by the way is a Methodist minister in Devon, England—is likely referring, specifically, to the democracies of the United States and the United Kingdom, as these are the primary topics of my article. However, his question is applicable, as perhaps he meant it to be, to endangered democracies wherever they may lie (yes, in both senses).

With this in mind, I would like to open the question wide—worldwide—to include any such struggling democracy, while recognizing that the democracies, world round, are being further endangered by the triumphant, trumpet-sounding pseudo-democracies of the US and the UK, and so these latter may very well provide good places to start the discussion, regardless.

I had previously told TC that I was writing a response to his question, but that, as it had quickly reached full-fledged post-length, I would, instead, publish it as a separate article. I still have the original draft saved, but I abandoned it, I thought temporarily, as it was turning into a monster—the post and the question itself. I shall continue to noodle on them both.

However, this is the question that is ever-present in my thoughts, and which is raised, again and again, by people with whom I talk: close friends, family members, new friends met in cafés, bookshops and on the streets, etc.

Roughly speaking, my answer is that we must get, and stay, at the roots of things—radical in the original sense of the word—and not chase the story-of-the-day fed to us via politicians, their official propagandists or the complicit corporate media.

For example, let us not get lost in the question of whether Iraq is becoming a democracy. This, was never intended. Why would the US and UK governments seek to bring democracy to Iraq when they undermine it at home? Why would the US and UK bring democracy to Iraq while they quash it the world round? And, then, I talk about the fundamental need for education, that a democracy can only exist when the citizenry—composed of individual citizens—is educated rather than propagandized. That neither the steady-state US nor UK governments are ever going to provide such an education, nor, indeed, do the vast majority of private schools, at the primary, secondary or university level, which are more concerned with granting entry to the establishment than bucking it via truth and critical thought. Therefore, WE must educate, those of us who are more politically aware, who have been fortunate enough to have been in a position to gain insights, who have had the time to explore the nature of things—we must begin to educate, by sharing of ourselves.

This is my rough answer. However, I want to open the question out to the whole of the world, to ask each of you.

WHAT IS TO BE DONE? How, as TC put it so well, can WE develop a form of people power to save us from the false choices we are offered?

Let us not leave the essential work to corrupt politicians operating within corrupt political systems.

Please comment away via the COMMENTS link, below. Or, for those with blogs of your own, feel free to take the conversation to your own sites, and perhaps consider linking back to this originating question. Regardless, invite others to join the discussion so that we may get back to basics, to the fundamentals of true democracy.

*****

If there is dissatisfaction with the status quo, good. If there is ferment, so much the better. If there is restlessness, I am pleased. Then let there be ideas, and hard thought, and hard work. If man feels small, let man make himself bigger.

~Hubert H. Humphrey (1911-78), U.S. Democratic politician, vice president. Speech, 14 Jan. 1966, University of Chicago.