Just Throwing It All Away
We live in a Celebrity culture. Everyone want those fifteen minutes of fame, no matter the cost: whether it be movie stars baring all for tabloids or supposedly normal people discussing the intimate details of their lives on talk shows, everyone seems to be ready to let anyone and everyone know the minutest details of their personal lives in order to get their names out there, to experience fame, which, in this culture, means importance. I've been watching it for years, avoiding involvement, thinking that what others chose to do with their privacy is not my business. After all, isn't that what privacy is all about? But it is an election year. And, suddenly, I am forced to reconsider. You see, I am working for a political party, doing phone calls, asking people how they plan to vote. I have done it before, without qualms. The point of the calls is to allow the party, on election day, to chivvy the committed voters out, make sure it gets every last vote it can. But this year, it bothers me. This year, I live in a world in which North American governments have given themselves incredible new powers to invade the lives of citizens, to track their actions and thoughts. This year, I live in a world in which thousands of people are being held, by these same governments, in anonymous detention centres around the world for such crimes as being in the wrong place at the wrong time, being of the wrong ethnicity, adhereing to the wrong religion, supporting the wrong side.
This year, I live in a world where supposedly democratic governments feel justified in ignoring the rights of their citizens and the rule of law -- national or international -- in the name of fighting terrorism. This year, I live in a world where an anonymous informer can give questionable information against a fellow citizen, and see him/her imprisoned, deported, tortured, with no right to know what was said by whom, no right of self-defence, no right to a public trial, no right to equality before the law. And suddenly I wonder, is it wise to tell a voice on the phone what you think? How you plan to vote? How do you know that the self-identified volunteer, pollster, journalist is what s/he says s/he is? If we met face to face, how could you be sure? Even if we have known each other for years? After all, the Germans are still dealing with the shock of opening the Stasi files, and discovering that almost everyone seems to have informed at one time or the other. How can you know I won't trade your expressed opinion one day for favours, or immunity, or just a moment of fame? Oh, come on! you say. Not here. It can't happen here. This is a democracy -- if it goes too far, the citizens will vote the bastards out! Oh? How many times have you heard someone opine that, where there's smoke there's fire? How often have you heard a police officer say, sincerely, that the innocent have nothing to fear? Are you aware of the impact of DNA testing on Death Rows across the United States? As of this moment, over 200 men have been exonerated by DNA testing in cases up to thirty years old. Some have already died for crimes they did not commit. Canda has its own conviction scandals, less well known, perhaps, because, without a death penalty, the public seems to think less is at stake. Are you so sure you want to trust your fellow citizens? The authorities? Have you forgotten that Hitler assumed power after a legitimate election, and that everything he did was technically legal? What would happen, say, if the elections went to the Right? If the combined governments of North American decided that certain political opinions, heretofore legal, were a threat to security because they provided aid and comfort to an enemy, shadowy, unidentified, but clear enough in the minds of the authorities? Would you be glad to tell me your vote then? To reply to the pollsters' questions? Our party keeps a database, for future reference, of supporters in the past four elections. Is your name on it? How will you feel if you wake up one morning and read that Léger's computers were hacked, and all their respondents' personal data stolen? Or the government had outlawed the Green Party and the NDP, and confiscated their menbership lists? How sure are you that, in this new world of police powers, you want to tell me your voting preferences? The struggle for a secret ballot was a long and ugly one, culminating in a series of laws that allowed voters to keep their opinion to themselves, to protect them from undue pressure before elections, or from retaliation afterward. There were good reasons for these laws: men -- women did not get the vote for decades -- were beaten, fired, jailed and murdered over their political opinions. As people are today, in places we chose to term backward, underdeveloped, oppressive. Australia was so far ahead of everyone, introducing the secret ballot throughout the 1850s, that it was called The Australian Ballot. New Zealand made the ballot secret in 1858. In Britain, secret voting came in 1872; in Canada, in 1874; 1888 in the United States. France had it, lost it, had it again. Eventually, the secret ballot was recognised as the sine qua non of democracy. Without it, no election can begin to be called democratic. One has only to look at countries where it does not yet exist, or where its existence is a sham, to see that a secret ballot is vital to even the most meagre democratic system. But, you and I seem to be ready to throw it away, me in my search for electoral victory, and you -- why? To please me? To feel important when I call you? To encourage my candidate in his labourious slog to election day? Why are we so ready to tell the anonymous pollster, the campaign worker, the complete stranger, the television audience, our political plans, our deepest beliefs, our most personal emotions? Have we forgotten how much it cost our parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, to win the right to a truly free vote? To the minimal control over the authorities we presently enjoy? To have and express dissenting opinions? To a share of power? To some modest control over their own lives? To be safe in their homes from police, government agents, from arrest, imprisonment, torture? Or are we so scared of the bogeyman that we are prepared to throw away the very things we claim to stand for to gain the approbation of the audience, the press, the authorities, the powerful, Big Brother? Have we forgotten the lessons of the McCarthy era? Have we so far forgotten who we were that, like Winston Smith, we are ready to surrender everything we are, everything we believe in, to gain that fifteen minutes of approval from the audience, the press, the authorities, the powerful, from Big Brother? When I am doing my calls, I occasionally run into elderly persons or immigrants who respond to my question with a short lecture on the importance of the secret ballot. I am supposed to come back at them with subtle questions to determine where their sympathies most likely lie. I don't. Instead, I hear my grandmother's voice, from my distant childhood, telling me stories of the struggle. Stories of the fight for the right to assemble, to vote, to participate in the governing of the nation, to unionise, for control over her own life. And, I hear the hopeless resignation of the sailors bound for death in an old Al Stewart song:
And here we are, just throwing it all away...
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