To me the Red Plan has been much more about the practice or mispractice of democracy than anything else. If it is a great success good for Duluth. If it is a great failure the hillside will not fall into Lake Superior. This is my home and I have felt compelled to take a stand for principle’s sake but compared to a Haiti or Ache Province in Indonesia its small potatoes.
Every day I read about people who have much more to worry about than we do in Duluth and this helps keep things in perspective.
Its the second eye opening story I’ve read recently by John Hari. I’m excerpting a small sample so shocking that it may very well deter folks from starting at the beginning. That would be a shame because it is one of the most hopeful and distressing stories I’ve run across lately. Hopeful in showing what a few people can do when determined to make the world a better place and distressing because it shows the fragility of a good cause when it threatens the powers that be.
As the meetings went on over the years, their demands for equality swelled. Why should women’s vaginas be mutilated? They screened a video of a female “circumcision” taking place for the men. One passed out; four vomited. “The rebellion just grew and grew,” Boge says. At a wedding in 2003, the bride and all her bridesmaids wore signs saying: “I am uncircumcised.” It was a Spartacus moment, and the women here weep as they remember it.
Not surprisingly, the distress comes from the impulse to shut down democracy by people for whom it is a great inconvenience. As Martin Luther King said: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
