I voted early this morning; we’ve been living in this neighborhood long enough that I recognized some people over at the poll, hung out and chatted for a bit. It felt good. I think that what’s happening today here in Canada highlights the single essential thing about democracy; I wrote about this almost three years ago, but it’s worth saying again: I don’t particularly trust “the people” to pick the right policies or even to pick the right leaders. I do, however trust them to detect the condition that the government has been bad and needs to be turfed. Which we, today, are apparently the process of doing. Frankly, I think it would be OK to pick the next government by random selection, and we probably wouldn’t do that much worse than the current electoral crap-shoot. The important thing—the only thing that really matters—is that we retain the right to throw ’em out in a peaceful and orderly fashion, at our sole discretion and for any reason. There are a lot of people in the world without that right. It’s the one that all the others flow from.
