Will of majority will prevail

January 14, 2000

In February 1999, there appeared in this space a short story titled "Stick-em-Up", which many may have missed. However, owing to more recent political developments and the hardening of certain tendencies, it has become necessary to repeat this story. When it was first written, we were merely witnessing the early signs of things to come . To be forewarned is to be forearmed.

Let the lessons be revealed! The story is as follows: "... Long ago, children played 'stick-em-up' without any major problems. Everyone understood the rules of the game. Those rules comprised our pact, our covenant of unwritten social convention. Everyone knew how to behave as the game unfolded. Basically, it was a game of hide and seek played with toy guns.

"As the team of seekers sought the hidden, it was customary for all those who first fell in the line of imaginary fire to be deemed 'dead' and be corralled back at the base until the end of the game. The team that made the most 'kills', won the contest.

"Then, suddenly, a new kid, named Gura, appeared on the block. Gura proved not to be an upholder of respected rules and inherited convention and so he exploited every loophole to gain advantage.

"Gura crept up from behind and hit other children real 'gun-butt' to the head and he seemed to relish the flow of warm blood. No one had ever committed such a brutal, violent act before the appearance of Gura.

"And that was not all. Gura captured people and tied them with vines to trees out in the bush rather than bring them back to base as was customary. He felt that such a tedious task, though justifiable, robbed him of much needed time to score additional 'kills'.

"One day Gura tied a victim to the trunk of a tree in which there was a black-ants nest. Yuh talk about weeping and gnashing of teeth! On another occasion he tied a player to a tree and forgot to go back to release his prisoner at the end of the game. Parental questioning about the victim's whereabouts brought about a mad rush by all and sundry back into the bush just as dusk was about to engulf everything.

"Yet, Gura was not to be deterred. So overwhelmed was he by the need to win at all cost. He made up his own rules as he went along and bent and stretched old convention to suit his own selfish desires, all the while undaunted by the cries of 'foul' and protests that even reach the ears of parents who traditionally remained aloof and allowed the children to sort out their own parameters. Six of the parents sought to talk to the new kid on the block, but yuh think Gura listen? No way!

"What really took the cake, however, was when Gura began to refuse to be 'killed', even though caught hands down. He would be trapped clearly in a line of imaginary fire and his fortunate captors would aim their toy guns and shoot him loudly, 'bang, bang!'

"Yet Gura would not concede. He came up with this pet line in response: 'And as ah falling...' ­ he totally rejected 'dying'. He claimed always to be merely flesh-wounded, diving into the bush as he fell, and still capable of 'shooting back' and defeating his bewildered subjugators.

"The last time he said "And as ah falling..." and dove into the bush, he fell on a huge stone and broke open his head. With the blood gushing down his face and mixing with the phlegm from his nostrils and the tears from his eyes, Gura kept bawling, much to the consternation of the others: 'Ah still ent dead!'

"That brought a complete cessation to the children's most favoured pastime. Without convention, the game could no longer be played. One loose canon had brought to the agenda not a new freedom but a freeness of framework in context of which nothing could work. "The game had to be reconstituted. It could not embody Gura's frontier type consciousness of anything goes and still be everyone's beloved game.

"New social convention and a new morality had to be found to promote the game further. 'But we never had this kinda problem before,' one child advanced. 'And we used to play good just as dem bigger children show we and de thing pass on, and all o' we did know how to behave when we playing until this no-where-ri-an, Gura, start he stupidness.'

"It was the stark reality of self-seeking, unscrupulous raw power. The kind of power only an accident of fate or genuine politics could bring to heel. This story is true for there is always a 'Gura' on the horizon. Believe that!"

What is the moral?

1. In a true first past the post democratic system, the major and cardinal purpose of elections and the electoral process is to bring the will of the majority to bear on political and economic issues through the voices and efforts of the "winning" rather than the "losing" representatives. And the winners must win fairly, ie they must play by the rules and by accepted convention.

2. The purpose of the Senate as a nominated chamber is to allow all the "wills" and voices and special interests to be heard in order to bring balance to governance (the six parents in the story). There should be no built-in advantage here for any side and Senators should be allowed to express their consciences freely and without fear.

Making a nominated special interest Senator a Minister in Cabinet, though a bending of convention, is nevertheless a far cry from making loser-candidates, ministers and members of Cabinet, paid by taxpayers, while the winners are most present and are supposed by definition to represent the entire constituency.

The former tactics can be seen as co-opting varied talent for expediency
(ie Gura tying up prisoners to advantageously speed up the game), while the latter is about defying the very nature of the democratic spirit
(ie Gura refusing to "die") and can only be justified by mavericks like Gura himself.