Democracy doesn’t happen every 4 years. It happens every single day.
My dad grew up in Spain under the Franco dictatorship. Spaniards of that era still remember the day, Feb 23rd, 1981, when armed Guardia Civil officers stormed the Congress of Deputies in an attempt to overthrow Spain’s first democratically elected government.
But Spain was a fragile nation in 1981, still reeling from the trauma of a horrific civil war and 4 decades of military dictatorship that had left it alienated from its European neighbors newly formed Union. While frightening, the 1981 Golpe was comprehensible, the growing pains of an infant democracy.
Never in my life could I have imagined experiencing anything remotely like that here, in the United States. America… the shining city on a hill. The beacon of democracy. The place people from all corners of the globe would look to as the example of what could be. Today, I find myself wondering can we be?
These stories now seem more like myths. The shining city on a hill leaves a shadow that drapes over the marginalized and masks the inequities and corruption on which it stands. The beacon of democracy disenfranchises voters and wages unauthorized wars.
But I see another America too. I see a resilient democracy that has withstood astounding attempts to tear it down. Yes, the baseless claims of election fraud are maddening and the militant attack on the peoples’ House and process unforgivable, but we are still standing. Our judges dismissed egregious lawsuits, our Congress reconvened to complete the constitutional process that certified our election and our voices were heard, whether they came from the ballot box or the mailbox. The system endured. It did precisely what it was supposed to do. It is bent, very bent, but it is not broken.
Photo by Jennifer Griffin on Unsplash