Democracy has been brought up in press quite a lot lately, between the ongoing drama of a presidential election and the constant bombardment of updates about gay marriages, and it’s actually got me thinking about how democracy is only half working in today’s America.

Oh don’t get me wrong: we still retain our freedoms that are guaranteed to us by the Constitution and to my knowledge no state government has any oppressive laws on the books, aside from Connecticut’s no-liquor-after-8pm law. Democracy is still very much alive in America; it’s just not as effective or fashionable as it used to be. The problem is that people are beginning to use it as a shield more and more, which helps to lessen the level of democracy available to people in America. Lemme explain:

Watered down to its simplest meaning, I believe democracy to be a system of government that allows the citizens of a nation to express their opinion freely and without a fear of consequences brought on by stating that opinion. Those are my own words, describing how I see a democracy would be in action. The US Government is a democracy based on representation: rather than giving each citizen their own voice in ruling bodies, they elect representatives to voice an opinion on their behalf. And I agree that this was the way to go in the late 1700’s and it’s still the way to go today. There are too many people to consult with if every citizen had to be contacted for decisions of state; we have enough trouble just getting people to vote! Imagine if they had to be consulted for every decision? No, I’m a proponent for the representative system.

And now take a look at the US, as a nation. From our inception in the mid 1700’s, and on through to around 1945, we tried to keep ourselves out of the international arena and keep neutrality at all times. It didn’t work for a majority of situations (being pulled into both World Wars obviously) but we had always tried to keep a “Hey, we’re America – let us be” attitude to world happenings. After 1945, after we had beat the piss out of anyone that stood against us in World War II, we changed. Not only were we pushed to the top of the international food chain, along with our Soviet counterpart, but we suddenly realized that we liked being involved and what’s more, we loved winning.

We’re Americans and we love to win. It’s a consistent theme that has run through the national mentality for over fifty years now: be the best, be number one, win, win, win! You know I’m right. In fact you can’t even try to tell me I’m not because you’ve got no facts to back it up. Why do you think Vietnam is still being talked about? Because we got our asses kicked – mostly due to bad management, poor support, and backstabbing back home – and the world knows it and we’re still very resentful of it. We like to win and worse, we feel we have to win.

So apply what a democratic system to our “must win” mentality and what do you get? You get what we’ve seen in the news over the last decade or so: a little more chaos everyday. You get people that fight with all of their might for something but then refuse to believe that they still lost a battle. Democracy means that someone will always win and someone will always lose. If everyone agreed on everything, we wouldn’t need a government at all; a democracy promotes conflict between different sides of an argument, and that’s where we have a problem.

Losers don’t take their loss well. This is what’s been happening the last couple of decades. People arguing for or against a law and lose – they then take matters into their own hands and ignore it because still don’t agree with it. This is very very wrong! I point back to the Rodney King verdict not so long ago. A huge amount of people that live in LA rallied to support their opinion that the officers that shot Rodney should be found guilt. Know what? I agreed with them. Based on the evidence shown on TV, those guys were in deep shit. Then the jury found them innocent and the rally turned into a looting and destructive mob that burned their own city. Guess what, kids? You lost my support right there. You were right and yet you proved yourselves to be complete wrong.

The image that stands out most from that whole Rodney King coverage is a woman with a placard proclaiming: “No Justice – No Peace!” because she wanted those cops in jail. Um, that’s “mob rule” and that’s not what America is supposed to be about. Got a problem with a law? Take it up in court. Take it to the streets, take it to your neighbors, take it online, take it on the air – if you take matters into your own hands, you’ve got nothing and you should be arrest like a common thug. I’ve still got issues with T-Mobile coverage: can I just go to my nearest tower and try to fix it? Hell no! That’s illegal!

And history repeats itself once more. Today, in New York City, a large group of couples were planning to storm a city office for marriage licenses and then have a rally. A rally? Hey, that’s great. More power too you. That’s what you should be doing; if gay marriage effected my life in the slightest, I would join you because I support your position. Storming an office for a license that is officially illegal in New York City (and state)? That’s a problem.

All over the country judges and other headline-hungry officials are performing marriages for gay couples. The nation has no federal law against it right now, so that is legal on one level, but if your state has a law against it, you should be disbarred and fired because you’re breaking the law. People in government roles cannot just decide on their own to ignore the laws that they don’t agree with. They need to fight things in a different way. Fight the amendment that President Bush proposed, yes, but you cannot go off on your own and ignore laws. Four words: Confederate States of America. They ignored the laws on slavery and drove the nation into a civil war. Think that’s over dramatizing a situation? Bullshit. In spite of the different subject matters, this premise was set a long time ago and it’s still very valid.

If officials start to ignore the state-level laws against gay marriages, what’s next? Official languages set up in each town, county or state? Could I become a selectman for my town and make Italian the legal language for my street? Could I set up a toll booth? Drinking ages the next law to be ignored? What if Salt Lake City wanted to make the drinking age 15 on Mondays and 35 on Fridays and a non-odd prime number for every other day? Speed limits after that? Should we make all speed limit signs be printed in kilometers per minute and in hex notation, if they happen to face an eastern direction? Registering cars now optional? And then drug laws the next thing to change arbitrarily?

Laws are not like a salad bar: you take the good with the bad. You cannot just take the laws that you happen to agree with and then leave the rest for everyone else to follow. If you don’t agree with a law, fight the law, but you cannot chose to ignore it and not face the consequences. And contrary to Thomas Jefferson’s opinion, “a little rebellion every now and then” is not a good thing – citizens when he was around weren’t as heavily armed as they are now.

Democracy… people need to remember that you don’t always have to win, just to be happy.