I watched Doris Kearns tell Anderson Cooper today that 43% of U.S. voters who voted in this week's midterm elections listed 'saving democracy' as a major driver of their turnout. One of our American icons among erudite, historic storytellers, Kearns put her finger on the fact that many of us still cling to the idealism we learned in First Grade Social Studies class.
I would assert, without any hope of original insight on my part, that many of us, as Americans, crave that simple idealism that democracy remains an ideal worth nurturing.
We don't perfect it. We don't even actually achieve it. But we do persist in our insistence that there is great utility in the indefatigable pursuit of it.
Like an exhausted parent, who grieves for how she might have done better, we accept that our individual and collective purpose in the American family is to embrace the continual striving for democracy's elusive fairness. Gigi Bousquet Williamson
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