Friday, April 29, 2011

 

In Tunisia on January 4, 2011, an obscure fruit-cart vendor and family bread-winner of Prince William's age making $10 a day, Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself on fire to protest the Tunisian dictatorship. He was a hero who gave away the greatest gift we all have, and ignited the Arab worlds magnificent 21st century struggle for freedom from dictators and monarchies, a struggle to realize a dream of democracy, as America once did so many years ago.

Monarchies and many dictatorships are based on hereditary privilege, where leaders are chosen by the chance of birth, not by their own efforts, skills, abilities or accomplishments. This is the old order that democracies must be vigilant in rejecting. Monarchies are medieval, a symbol of the worst sort to all democratic and egalitarian-loving peoples. This symbol is the antithesis of the 21st century's great central struggle.

Even if a contemporary monarchy has little seeming power, it may in fact have significant power, emotional and affective suasion, a grip on people's  attention and perception of what constitutes a free society, obscuring the principle of equal opportunity for all, the value of individual initiative and hard work in creating a good life. All these values get distorted when we slaver over royalty.

The mere presence of any monarchies in the 21st century, with or without power, is the wrong symbol for the increasingly sophisticated, enlightened, educated, cognitive cultures arising, that give hope for the expansion of democracy, the one fair and decent form of government.  

The story of democracy will not be complete until all forms of hereditary leadership have passed into the history books.

Our current genuflection to the "royals" in Britain stimulated by this wedding of no particular importance except for that medieval term "monarchy", is a celebration of extreme privilege and wealth, and our unthinking, in this case, love of fairy tales and dress-up, demonstrating that such a hereditary monarchy does indeed have power. Let Disney satisfy our need for dress-up and fairy tales...

In America that threw royalty out at great cost of American lives, a nation founded on the ABSENCE of

royalty, we should be spending this wasted wedding time and money on the non-privileged of this world yearning to be free, who rightly abhor the very word royalty and its denotation of high privilege, unearned status and often historical or present horrors. The untold millions of U.S. dollars spent in so many ways on this unseemly spectacle could be turned to helping the revolutionaries in the Arab world fighting for just a piece of what Americans already have. Call it the 1776 Fund. I'll contribute.

Our British friends can of course do what they want, even to holding on to the last costly vestiges of pomp and privilege.But America has stood as a beacon for many of freedom, opportunity and equality. I pray our relentless obsession with royalty and this wedding of two apparently nice people will end quickly and that in the best of endings some reflection will be achieved concerning perspective, and the meaning of history and this new so-promising century.

CONTACT: Frank Farley, Ph.D,     frank.farley@comcast.net     (215)668-7581