The US created democracy, but US creationists are now turning it into demockracy. In 1992 Leonard Cohen wrote a song claiming that ‘democracy is coming to the USA’. Did he intuitively feel back then that democratic values were going to decline? Hard to tell, but his song turned out to be prophetic. As we stated in our daily connect yesterday: the battle for democracy is now on
But what kind of ‘democracy’ was Cohen singing about? Poets often don’t know these things. They feel a current and the words just flow. In 1992 there were no clear signs yet of political democracy coming under threat. On the contrary, the Cold War had just ended and democracy had been victorious. Nevertheless, it was precisely at that moment Cohen wrote his song. Little did he know at the time about ‘economic democracy’.
The term hadn’t been invented yet. It refers to the notion that beyond political democracy, there is an extension to democracy in the economic field. For economic democracy to be possible, political democracy has to be established first. That’s yet another reason why it is so very important at this moment to make sure the creationists will not succeed in destroying the fundamental freedoms and civil liberties established by the founding fathers of the USA. Democracy must win this crucial battle. Ours is a political/religious blog, but we should be blind if we failed to see that a nasty virus has affected US fundamentalist Christians.They have become a threat to peace, democracy and prosperity.
The road ahead, therefore, is first to save democracy and then to extend it to include an economic dimension. Democracy is about freedom and political equality. But this should be extended to economic equality. For there can be no peace without economic equality. This means that we all should become owners of productive capital. How this can be done is briefly described in the related article (see below).
We especially refer also to: www.cesj.org We claim that - prophetically – Cohen is referring to economic democracy, where he sings: ‘It’s coming to America first, the cradle of the best and of the worst. It’s here they got the range and the machinery for change. And it’s here they got the spiritual thirst’. To view a video of the song, click here.