Democracy is a system of government by which political sovereignty is retained by the people and either exercised directly by citizens or through their elected representatives. Many countries have practiced democracy throughout the years but not all have achieved satisfying results. Democracy can be said to be a double-edged sword as it may allow a society to prosper or fail. I shall scale down this issue of Democracy to an election of leaders in my very own class.
Every year, it is essential to elect new CEC council members to help carry out administrative issues given out by the school. Hence, it is important for us to elect capable leaders to help us out in these areas. However, the leaders must also be influential in class and be able to please the majority. Therefore, Democracy is taken up to find these leaders amongst 3Q.
The teachers believe that their students would be honest with their feelings and would choose the most capable leader in class. Hence, they allowed us to control the whole election process although giving their own opinions from time to time. Personally, I felt that the class was not being too serious about the election process. They nominated students just for the fun of it and made jokes about them rather than choosing a rightful person who would take care of administrative matters. In this case, Democracy would have lost its purpose as the students have treated this like a joke.
After the whole process, our leaders were elected with Jia Xing as the monitor, Ryan as the assistant monitor and Eric as the treasurer. I was worried about this set-up as the election process had not been taken seriously. As time went by, it was seen that our assistant monitor was more hardworking than the monitor. Some of us were unhappy about this issue and decided to inform the form teacher about it. There were some of us who wanted a re-election as they felt that the monitor had not met their standards. At this moment, I recounted how our class had made their decision initially and was disappointed in how fickle they are.
In the end, the request for a re-election was accepted and the roles of the monitor and assistant monitor were swapped. Jia Xing made a pledge that he would work hard to gain back the trust that we had placed in him. Our class was satisfied with this end result.
Democracy is not a bad in itself, it totally depends on how the people carry out Democracy in their society. Some instances where Democracy fails are when people vote out of biasness or just for fun. However, Democracy would allow the society to be satisfied with their own leaders as we are the ones who elected them. Therefore, the topic of Democracy still sits on a fence.
1 comment:
I rather like the fact that you have used a personal experience to prove a point, that democracy is an ideal which works only when the voters are responsible and understand the implications of their decision/rights.
However, you do need to be precise in the use of the language. For instance, in the last sentence, the phrase 'to sit on the fence' is wrongly used.
The phrase implies someone who does not commit himself to any one side, someone who is weak or cowardly. I think that here, you mean to say that you are 'ambivalent' about democracy, whether or not it is a good thing to have? [ambivalent - to be uncertain, possibly having 2 differing views about something]
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