Democracy III

One the most celebrated aspect of democracy is freedom of choice. A person can speak anything, do anything (as long as it’s legal) and live life the way he or she wanted. So it’s quite ironic that freedom is like a rewinding coil that stops democracy from succeeding. Hallmark of any democratic institution is allowing commoners to elect the leaders. The idea to let people decide their own fate by electing the representative is quite noble in essence but for most part impractical in results. I think such problem arise because most of the people are unaware about how Democracy works or how it should work.

Generally people don’t appear for exams without preparing for it. If they do then they fail the exams. Now imagine that you don’t know anything about exam or the curriculum and you are expected to appear for the exams just because you are above 21. Moreover not only that you are guaranteed to pass the exam but the results of the exams will shape your destiny. Are you ready for this scenario? Well, you can’t answer No to this question because that’s what precisely happens in modern democracy. We have exams so that we have right to tell people that you are K-12 or Bachelors’ or Masters or Doctors. You have to pass the driving test to have right to drive on the road. Yet one doesn’t give any exam or acquire any knowledge before voting. We rely on so called expert opinions of Media. It’s sad that Media wields so much power lately but it’s not hard to understand why, because we as a society pretty much outsourced the ‘thinking’ part to Media. We ask them to evaluate our representative. We ask them to interview prospective representative. We get impressed with even though we know that the so called rallies or conventions is nothing but elaborate charade to create the illusion of popularity. We do all this only because we don’t have time from our busy schedule. We like to blame everything on dirty politicians but we conveniently forget that ‘we’ are the politicians. With such a scenario it all most makes sense for politicians to join hands with Media. The blurring line between two is worrisome.

The only way out of this situation is we the people start doing the job we are supposed to do towards maintain democracy. We the people should start playing our role in the democracy. Freedom doesn’t come for free. The way to fix the crumbling democracy and stopping it from turning into special interest entity is we learn about our democratic institutions. What does head of the state do? He can’t do no shit without approval of legislative body. So what exactly is legislative body? How do we put better people in the legislative body? How hold politicians and Media accoutable for their actions? Such questions are not hard to answer. At least, it shouldn’t be hard to answer.

How to make them more accountable? What are the ways to make them accountable? To attain this and it may sound little radical, how about we make people take a course on democracy and make them pass a small exam before allowing them to vote? We make people accountable for their own action, other things will follow automatically.