Devolving Democracies

Mr. P's Words (by Richard Michelle-Pentelbury)

Just now

We are in much fragmentation. Our world churns with disparate ingredients, political, social, religious, and even spiritual. Much differentiation pervades. Much unhappiness persists. And like the old movie, ‘Network’, one may feel the need to thrust one’s head out of the window and shout out something like: “I’m fed up with the system and I won’t take it anymore!” Still, some of us, ostrich-like, just put our minds underground.

Democracy as an ideal holds to the simple rubric of majority rule. It works so long as one is comfortably not marginalized. (It even works if one just keeps one head down.) Yet it is an anathema to the spirit if one is the outcast, vilified, traduced, or calumniated. We wish to keep things simple. Live and let live. Be who you are. Just don’t expect me to be the same as you. Be vegetarian. Be against blood transfusion. Be against (Covid) vaccinations. Be a Baptist or a Catholic or a Jew. Be gay, or even some 'other' name. Just don’t over-mandate me ‘to be’ too.

Majority rule can create a disabling sense of one’s worth. It can overwhelm expected norms. After all, we don’t want ‘them’ over-taking us. We don’t wish for our current status quo to be threatened. And so, as a majority of Blue Smarties, say, we grow uncomfortable with more and more Purple Smarties entering our domain. They clothe themselves differently. They make for cultural distastes in our life. They break our codes of conduct. They clack together in a language we don’t understand. And now, as their numbers grow, we find ourselves too soon under threat of being overwhelmed by their voting powers too, and we Blues don’t like it!

Mandates have that effect on the individual. One loses one's vote. Mandates demand. One loses one's freedom. Yet safely enough, should the majority vote that everyone must wear a seat-belt, one can choose never to drive or be a passenger in a vehicle again. After all, democracy has it that one give in to The Group’s wishes, or one, relatively freely, may choose not to participate. One can choose. One can stay home. One can walk. One can talk. One can write freely. … Or can One?

Draconian measures have it that one must comply; or suffer direct censure. Bank balances can be frozen. Freedom of movement can be rigidly curtailed. Social participation can be severely restricted. Religious assembly can be cauterized. Individualism can become eradicated, despite the evident paradox of a social credit system on YOU and your activity becoming imposed. (After all, your purchase of too much broccoli may count against you.) As a person of The State, one is subject to personal checks and balances.

What is done cannot necessarily be undone. We can return most purchases we make for a full refund. We can unsubscribe. We can walk out of the urgent care clinic if the wait is too long for us, and we grow too impatient. We nowadays can even choose the right to die. But once having had the polio vaccine we cannot take it out of us; nor so for measles, shingles, malaria, or smallpox. In the bloodstream, jabs do their valuable thing. We can be comfortable, if not even grateful, for their validation in us. They were tested. Are tested. We can feel secure.

But not so for all. There still is far too much controversy surrounding ‘The Covid Jab’. There are far too many news reports, articles, web sites, interviews, gainsayers, and medical experts warning one not to admit every (new) booster into one’s bloodstream. Yet in the bonny province of B.C., with the passing of Bill 36, the mandate was clear: Get jabbed, or else!*

Choice is a precious commodity. One cannot un-ring a bell. Life itself depends on ‘The Mandate,’ (as on this November, 2025, a herd of healthy B.C. ostriches proved.)

In the ‘free world’ we did not think it would come to this. We did not expect to have our livelihoods threatened by the gods of health and pharmaceutical industries and complicit governments and puppet leaders of essentially non-scientific narratives. Like science itself, we expected instead to have our lives evolving on established truths, yet perpetually fluid to new information, new verifications, new admissions of the need to alter course. Such is the stream of life. Such is going with the flow. One has choices! Or do we? What if it is too late?

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*Bill 36 BC is a new law that replaces the Health Professions Act and changes how health professions are regulated. It gives the Health Minister the authority to appoint College Boards, to mandate vaccines for health practitioners, and to punish them for challenging government policies. Some critics say it violates the independence and rights of self-governing professions and the public interest. It was approved by the legislature on November 24, 2022 and received Royal Assent the same day. It will come into force by a Cabinet order. ~Wikipedia