Throughout a diverse crowd full of women, my eyes were brought to focus on one particular person who you would think was there with the opposite intention than the reason for the gathering. If you have not brought to mind a stereotype yet, I will give you the answer: a 53-year-old wealthy Caucasian male. Seeing him in the crowd brought me a whirlwind of emotion as happiness, confusion, and curiousness.
The crowd was everchanging with people moving in closer or farther away from the stage of the Atlanta Women’s March onto 2020. With that being said, the man and I would be shifted closer and closer as the crowd changed, to the point where we ended up shoulder to shoulder with one another, or more of shoulder to elbow since he was much taller than I am. I am not a shy person, nor am I someone to keep my curiousness withheld in my thoughts, so I unraveled them and began a conversation with the 53-year-old man.
We started off conversing as anyone would within a crowd of a protest, complimenting each other’s signs. With one quick look at his sign, you could tell how much effort he had put into the creation of it; it was a large double-sided laminated poster, one side was a picture of Stormy Daniels blowing a kiss with photoshopped devil horns onto her head and the other side was a picture of President Donald Trump with a countdown clock of how many days until he would be leaving The Oval Office. Of course, without a doubt, I had to give him props on his amazing intricate creation. He quickly looked at me, smiled, glanced at my simple but effective sign, and without hesitation read it out loud saying “we the people are pissed”.
After the break of ice that had just happened within less than 2 minutes, I began to introduce myself so in the same manner he did as well, his name was James. He began to share the stories of all the strange looks he had gotten at the beginning of the protest when he was not holding his sign since people thought he was there to protest the scheduled protest. James then began telling me what he does for a living, he said he had been a male nurse for a little over 27 years. I asked him why he felt the need to attend this political protest, and his answer was he wanted to make sure that we did not let our democracy die.
While reflecting back on that day, specifically that moment with James speaking about exerting his power and his refusal to let even the tiniest bit of our democracy erode, it had the effect to bring me back to an article I had read for my Introduction to Political Science course, Subverting Democracies from How Democracies Die by Levitsky and Ziblatt. My thoughts started clicking with one another on how there was so much effort people put into exerting their democracy for our government to not erode even in the slightest, because it can happen so discreetly as it has happened in many other countries. For example, Peru becoming a dictatorship without the citizens even thinking it could happen from the day Alberto Fujimori began his presidential term on July 28, 1990.
The backsliding, erosion, and death of democracy is something that the citizens of countries can keep from happening because the power is within the people, not the government. Elected government officials are being put into those positions by the people for the people to serve the people, they are not here to feel superior and want to keep power away from the people it belongs to. Which is why citizens need to vote, go to protests, attend town hall meetings, in any way show that they are exercising their democracy. That is the only way we can prevent the death, backsliding, or erosion of democracy in our government.