The Whisper of Self-Government

The Sound of Democracy in America

It wasn’t always a whisper. It was once a roar. A battle cry. A gavel rap. It was the sound of a busy harbor, a musket firing, of political scholars bickering.

We heard it. We heard it before we were Americans - while we were still called pilgrims, colonists, heathens, and refugees. The whisper wasn’t a promise, it wasn’t even a hope. It was a calling. A calling sent not kings or aristocrats, but to the everyman.

Everyone heard it, but most ignored it. They pushed it out of their minds. It was scary. It took work. It wasn’t a sure thing.

Yet the whisper continued. “If you build it, they will come.”

And so those who had nothing to lose - who were so periled that courage was their only option - built it. They crossed an ocean. An ocean deemed crossable only a century and a half earlier. And they suffered. Most of them died from the cold and disease, but their desire for self-governance and freedom persevered.

Then colonizers came and smothered it. At least as much as they could. The smothering didn’t last long. The whisper found its way on a sheet of paper. It took only one thousand four-hundred and fifty-eight words to declare that governments are instituted among men, deriving their powers from those men, and that if a government becomes destructive of those ends, it is the right - nay, duty - of those men to abolish it. That was self-government. That was America.

We built it, and they came. So many of them came. They came and they built more. Our new colossus was a beacon of hope. A paean to successful self-governance. We were a shining city on a hill.

We showed France and Ireland that the heretofore mysterious whisper of self-government could be trusted. It was scary, yes. It was dangerous, yes. But it was worth it. And the whisper became a voice: the voice of teachers in classrooms, of lawyers in courtrooms, and of protesters on streets.

But now it has quieted again. Yes, we still protest, we still lawyer, and we still teach, but something deep down has broken. It’s not our fault. It was bound to happen. A Constitution can only last for so many centuries without eventually failing somehow. That’s why we amend it - or we should amend it - regularly. The first step to amending it is realizing the problems.

We allowed special interests to corrupt our government. We allowed politicians to decide the rules for their own elections. We allowed parties to district our land to prioritize the preservation of their own power over the fair representation of their constituents. But worst of all, we believed politicians when they told us to blame our fellow citizens for this. We fell for it. Hook, line, and sinker.

The whisper is still here, though. It will never leave America. It resides in the voices of the Independents, the Third-Parties, the Election Reformers, the Watch-Dogs, the Whistle-Blowers. They know what’s wrong. They know it’s scary; that we don’t want to think about it. But we have to. We have to listen for the whisper. It’s the only way America can survive. It’s the only way democracy can survive.

-Ben Chapman, August 2017