Thank you, Judith for the opportunity to light the chalice this morning. Judith asked me to talk about democracy.…In two minutes.

People tend to equate democracy with voting. More people voted in the presidential primaries this year than ever before in US history. With the war in Iraq dragging on; home prices plummeting; foreclosures, unemployment, and gas prices soaring; schools failing; and civil liberties vanishing, people are desperate for change. They hope voting will bring it.

Voting, after all, is relatively easy, although, as we saw especially in the 2000 election, that isn’t a guarantee your vote will count. Voting is free, and takes but a few moments every year or so. Sounds like a good deal. Too good?

In 1964 we elected Lyndon Johnson because Barry Goldwater was going to widen the Vietnam War and bomb North Vietnam. Johnson sent hundreds of thousands of troops to Vietnam and carried out the bombing campaign of the North that Goldwater had promised. Millions of Vietnamese and over 50,000 US troops died. Only direct action by millions of Americans, combined with the determination of the Vietnamese, forced the US to withdraw from Vietnam.

In 2006, we elected Democratic majorities to Congress to end the war in Iraq. Nevertheless, Congress passed bill after bill to fund that war. Senator McCain voted for those funding bills — as did Senators Clinton and Obama.

In just about every democratic country, there is a party that is presumed to represent the interests of working people: the Social Democrats in many European countries, the Labour Party in England, the Democratic Party here. As the working people are everywhere in the great majority, you might think that these parties would always win. Yet, in most countries, power tends to swing back and forth between the pro-worker party and the more “aristocratic” one.

Why? Because generally speaking, the parties do not deliver what they promise, and eventually working people try the other guys. We’ve had 53 presidential elections and after all that, inequality of wealth is at its greatest in US history. There is a feeling that we must have change and, perhaps this time, we’ll get it right.

Voting is free. Voting is easy. In an article in the March, 2008 Progressive, titled “Election Madness,” Howard Zinn wrote, “Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens.”