STEVE PIECZENIK TALKS

The Winner in the Democratic/Republican Debates/Primaries: American Democracy!
The World is Watching our Tedious Voting Process.

By now, we must all be fagged out by the tedious process of debates, ads, and Tweets compelling us to decide on which candidate we might want to vote for in the 2016 presidential primaries. I am certainly surfeit with TV commercial espousing the merits of a new drugs inevitably accompanied by a sonorous litany of side effects.

In a more lucid moment, afar from the boob tube, I realize that somehow this incredible satiation of our senses; with the mounting verbiage of the different assortment of presidential candidates; has garnered a certain value, if not wholesome benefit. After asking myself the inane question as to why I watched so many candidates espousing their self-aggrandizing hosannas repeatedly, I realized that there might be an underlying rationalization to which I had not been aware. 

I thought of the simple fact that the constant spotlight on our presidential elections are far more important for the world to watch than it might appear on the surface to us, Americans, who must vote, one way or another. Imagine, young dissidents in China, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, who are trying to emulate our collective American sense of dissatisfaction of our political elite through civil disobedience. These youths watch our elections to see how each of our candidates can jockey in speech and action without inciting a blowback of peremptory force or whimsical termination from our own big brother.

Folks, think of the Arab Spring in Cairo five years ago, when so many of that country’s youths were willing to defy the corruption of President Mubarak’s tenure in order to install a ‘democratic regime’. They succeeded in electing a member of the Islamic Brotherhood who was eventually deposed by an Egyptian military coup, assisted by outside ‘interventionists’[ I wonder whom? ]. The point is that Egypt had attained, for a brief few moments, a glimpse of what protests in concert with the ballot box can create without ensuing major bloodshed or civil war. As transient as democracy may arise, it is still the youths’ Elan Vital for the Middle East, be they Shi’ite, Sunni, or Alawite. 

Therefore, on this weekend before the Iowa caucus/NH primary, I wish all the candidates, “God Speed”. I also want to remind them that as tedious and debilitating as this voting process is for the respective candidates, they are now serving a greater cause then just our Republic’s common good.

Our ambitious candidates are our surrogate “Ambassadors of Good Will”; reminding those who aspire to “Freedom” that the road to free choice is littered with many unforeseen obstacles, none of which are insurmountable. I have learned one very important lesson in the past forty years of service to our USG… Democracy is CONTAGIOUS!! 

There is an old German proverb about rulers:

“He/She who would rule must hear and be deaf; see and be blind.”