Overheard at my office...
"Schools are failing our children. My granddaughter takes civics at high school. She came home and said that our country is a democracy. I told her, 'No, it's not. It's a republic.' She kept insisting that it's a democracy because that's what she's been taught at school. Can you believe what they're teaching our kids these days?"
The person saying this is running for public office. And people wonder why our democratically elected government is dysfunctional.
[Title taken from this.]
For Pete Sake!
3 weeks ago
I spent two hours yelling at CNN last night. Everything that they would say that I thought sounded decent, smart and ethical, would get booed by the crowd.
ReplyDeleteThe future scares me.
Well if it was a democracy, we would not have need for congressmen or senators, no? A democracy comes out to be a direct vote on every issue, by all the people,if I sit correct. In our republic we elect representatives to look after our best interests, or one would hope that is the case. If I am wrong, enlighten me.
ReplyDeleteI think the schools in our country have not changed much at all in the last 50 years. They continue to be more about socialization than education and the nonsense that I was taught that passed for history has just been replaced by a different mythos.
ReplyDeleteBecca,
ReplyDeleteEver heard of "of the people, by the people and for the people"? That's a democracy.
According to Webster's dictionary:
de·moc·ra·cy
[dih-mok-ruh-see] noun, plural -cies.
1. government by the people; a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system.
2. a state having such a form of government: The United States and Canada are democracies.
3. a state of society characterized by formal equality of rights and privileges.
4. political or social equality; democratic spirit.
5. the common people of a community as distinguished from any privileged class; the common people with respect to their political power.
Origin: 1525–35; < Middle French démocratie < Late Latin dēmocratia < Greek dēmokratía popular government, equivalent to dēmo- demo- + -kratia -cracy
We have a representative democratic republic (republic, meaning not ruled by a monarch). As long as we have a free electoral system, we will have a democracy. I think that the woman I overheard was mistaking the capitals of the words for the lowercase - Democratic and Republican vs. democratic and republican. The district that my boss represents is a Republican district. But it's also a democratic district.
Well in all technicality they're both right - I believe the term is democratic republic. But the point stands - if an official running for public office makes a remark like that about our governmental system, that means the officials running our government are even more out of sync with the rest of us than we thought only moments before.
ReplyDeleteOur country is neither, though it claims to be both. It is an oligarchy.
ReplyDelete