We the People

Did Chicken Little Need a Vacation?

Today there will be picnics in the park, hotdogs and barbecue, cold beer and lemonade, apple pie, ice cream and mosquito bites all across the United States. At nightfall there will be fireworks and concerts featuring Sousa marches.

This is the birthday of one of the greatest political innovations the world has ever seen. The American democracy was born out of bursting bombs and intense battles, ideological and lethal. It continues to struggle to maintain a dynamic balance between greed and fairness, authoritarianism and inclusiveness, oligarchy and equality, dominance and diversity. It remains a work in progress.

I have come to believe that democracy never achieves a static balance. It has no solid end state. It is always in motion, leaning left and right like a tightrope walker, never fully stable. It is a messy business and one that elicits strong passion in its participants. Anyone who cares about their government has opinions about how it should proceed. These opinions arise out of emotions generated from basic needs and desires, neither of which are always, if ever, fully altruistic.

Jerry Brown, the former governor of California and mayor of my hometown, Oakland, once said to me rather curtly, in response to my question about how does the belief in the common good affect government,“There is no such thing as the “common good”. He went on to explain that all governance is driven by a collision of competing interests seeking to secure implementation ahead of other interests. The concept of “common good” as a universally accepted vision is an unrealistic goal that ignores the complexity of human behavior.

I have come to see that his response wasn’t cynical but realistic. Societies never obtain complete agreement among its citizens. There are always competing needs and beliefs. In fact, competition for recognition is the dynamic balance that drives a democracy like the counterbalances on a tightrope walker’s balance pole. It is only when one set of beliefs gain significant dominance over others that democracy begins to teeter dangerously. If the tightrope walker’s balance pole should be weighted significantly on one end more that the other, then dynamic balance becomes becomes impossible.

Democracy requires competing ideas to keep it in balance. It begins to wobble precariously when the forces that support it are undermined by attacks designed to favor one set of beliefs over another. The danger to the dynamic balance is intensified when attacks are persistently made in spite of a preponderance of facts that disprove their validity.

Like Chicken Little, in the folk tale about a hysterical hen that assumes because an acorn fell on her head the sky is falling, there are those self-serving individuals who would have the country believe that everything about the government is rotten and the country is falling into ruin. These individuals tell us that our elections are all rigged, (except for those they won of course), our public schools are conspiring to turn our children into sexual perverts, that racial oppression and discrimination never happened and easy access to lethal weapons are necessary to keep us all safe.

When the other animals listened to Chicken Little’s claims about the sky falling, hysteria took over. There was chaos and despair driven by an irrational fear. This fear was their ultimate undoing because the sly fox saw things as they really were and lured the animals into his den with a promise he knew how to keep them safe. Once in his den, he ate them all.

Democracy is messy. No one person or group is supposed to always get their beliefs and needs fully accepted and met. Ideological dominance is the unwanted weight on one end of the tightrope walker’s balance pole that threatens the undoing of the balance to keep a nation moving forward.

On this July Fourth, I hope enough people realize that the differences we have are just acorns falling from a tree. They shouldn’t frighten us. They make us stronger because they challenge us to see beyond our fears and prejudices.

Democracy requires all of us to take a step back from time to time and focus on what is good and right about it. It requires us to remember that its weaving and wobbling on the tightrope of history is what keeps us moving forward and out of the fox’s den.

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I wish you all a safe and joyful July Fourth. Enjoy this day. It is the birthday of a great experiment.

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