The deed is done.
Apologies to those of you who have heard this story. It's a secondhand account, and I'm not nearly as good a writer as should do this justice, but it's been on my mind lately.
When I hear the President talking about the elections in Afghanistan and Iraq, and how the people are clamoring for democracy and freedom, I find myself in a tricky situation. I do believe that democracy is a superior form of government to, say, tribal warlords, but I have to call bullshit.
My dad was in Prague shortly after Czechoslovakia (yes, I know that's two separate countries now) was opened to the west, around the same time the Berlin Wall fell. Like, within a few weeks. He'd had some business meetings in northern Italy the previous week, and a trade conference in Düsseldorf the following week, and he and his Pan-Western-European buddies decided they'd take the opportunity to drive through Eastern Europe. They were obviously westerners, and the Czechs were all pleased to meet them and naturally curious about life beyond the borders. In a café one day, they were asked by patrons at a neighboring table what it means to vote.
These people, Europeans, raised under a Soviet regime at least pretended to be educating its citizens (80s kids-remember how we had to compete?), had no idea what they'd gotten themselves into. They did it on the blind faith that it could be better than what they'd had before, but they were just as scared of it, and rightly so: just because it's a democracy doesn't mean it's perfect (see Milosevic just to their south). Freedom was an indefinable ideal. They really had no idea what it was or why they might want it; they simply had more of it than they used to.
You want to know how scary freedom really is? Imagine being in Terezín when the first people showed up after you were allowed to be honest about what happened there 50 years before. What do you say to other Czechs? What do you say to westerners? What do you say to the people who had been held there, and were visiting freely, to try to heal the old psychic scars?
The people of Afghanistan and Iraq (and Iran and North Korea) aren't clamoring for democracy and freedom. Those people wouldn't know democracy if it bit them in their collective asses (neither would President Bush, so that's included in my vote against him today). If they're clamoring at all, it's for something other than warlord-ocracy, because just about anything could be better. We can't give them freedom. It's not a substance that can be spread around like so much ketchup. We can't even really teach them what it is. The best we can do is to try to set up situations where they can learn to want it on their own.
Most of us, even if we believe we're not taking our freedoms for granted, still don't really understand what it means to have them, and to have always had them. For the introspective, that can be an uncomfortable situation. The only thing we can really do is to treat it like mind and muscle: exercise or it will atrophy. That is, use it or lose it. Thus,
I VOTED.
No polling problems to report; I was #349 in my precinct at about 2:00 this afternoon. Got some Dog chilling to watch the returns tonight (nothing like British beer for an American election, eh?). Here's to waking up to a new world tomorrow.