Their democracy and ours

For the past few weeks, I’ve been driving all over Durham attending meetings.

Tuesday nights, I’ve been going to the “Conversations with Commissioners” public meetings called by the Durham County Commissioners. These meetings are meant to demonstrate that the commissioners are listening to the constituents, that they aren’t making unpopular decisions without our input. They’ve been exciting and intense, and marked by the deep divisions between what citizens want the commissioners to do—save Durham schools by any means necessary—and what the commissioners themselves want to do—exercise the political will necessary, in the words of Durham County Manager Mike Ruffin, to push through cuts in spite of popular resistance.

Monday nights, I’ve been meeting with a committed and energetic group of people from all over Durham: high school students and teachers, city workers, students at Durham Tech. We are black and white and brown. We are legal and “illegal.” We are renters and homeless. We are gay and straight and everything in between. We are united by a sense of our own power, what we can accomplish when united by a common purpose.

We also represent a fundamental challenge to our elected officials, because we take democracy seriously. They think, like all public officials these days, that it is enough to offer us a public hearing, to acknowledge that they’re listening and paying attention, that they feel our pain.

But it’s clear to us that they don’t feel our pain. During the hearing, the overwhelming impression from them was one of boredom. They were watching the clock, accepting their berating like “good” public officials, biding their time. They’ll go home to their publicly funded mansions, and perhaps the more sensitive among them will shed a tear or two for the working men and women that buy their silk pajamas. In the morning, they’ll wake up, walk into the County Commissioners’ office at 200 East Main Street, and pass the budget they planned to pass all along.

Is this what democracy looks like? A sober assessment of our current political reality will tell us that yes, by and large, this is what democracy looks like today. Opinion polls and public hearings provide political cover for exactly what public officials planned on doing all along.

But don’t abandon all hope just yet. There’s a different democracy at work in the world as well. That democracy takes place in meetings all over the country and world much like those I’ve been attending on Monday nights, where ordinary people plan collective actions; where we begin to recognize our power when acting together; where we begin to recognize that our interests are different from those who decide our fate; where we begin to recognize that we create the world from day to day with our own work, and should therefore be responsible for running it.

Glimpses of a similar sentiment have emerged again and again at those County Commissioner meetings. There, time and again, residents have suggested how to balance the budget in a way that would save teachers’ jobs, and thus save Durham schools.

Cut from the top, they’ve said. These administrators, who anyway don’t represent us, are getting rich off our taxes while many of us live a paycheck away from homelessness.

Stop building prisons. Stop construction of the planned $100 million county “justice” center. These projects themselves, if delayed just a year (or, inshallah, indefinitely) would themselves provide enough money to keep every current teacher in the classroom.

Some teachers have even offered to work less, to take a pay cut, in order to keep their fellow teachers employed.

This is what democracy looks like—intelligent and capable people everywhere demanding to run our world themselves. We know what our schools, our neighborhoods and our workplaces need and how best to run them. Sometimes, we don’t know that we know. We lack the confidence to challenge those that govern us, to challenge their vision of poverty for the many and wealth for the very, very few and always fewer.

But in every meeting and every time we speak out, our confidence grows. At times, we take action together—we occupy buildings and city streets, we challenge and expand the boundaries of what we think is possible—and our confidence grows by leaps and bounds.

And we’re going to need it, because we have a lot of work to do. The logic that governs our world, the priorities that our public officials follow, are not in our interest, not in the least.

But this is our world, not theirs. We built it. We maintain it. We live in it.

It’s time to take it back.

Michael Stauch is a third-year Ph.D. candidate in history. His column runs every other Friday and today as an online exclusive.