We aren't ready for democracy

On Sunday, November 1, 2009, Swiss voters voted to suppress the Muslims in their country. With a surprisingly high 57.5% of the vote, the Swiss population (or at least those who voted on Sunday) have voted to pass a ban on the new construction of minarets in the country. Minarets are the tall distinctive spires on Muslim mosques.

I'll let you read the (controversial?) back story from the two article links above (and other sources you can easily find yourself if you're an overachiever) because what I really want to do is comment.

It's one thing when America continually votes against basic human rights (à la LGBT rights, gay marriage, health care, and so forth), but this is a European country doing it! America is generally viewed as quite conservative compared to its developed-nation counterparts, so the Swiss vote was definitely surprising to me. But the more I thought about it, the less surprising it should have been.

Europe probably has just as many issues as America has. One of the continually-discriminated groups in Europe are Gypsies. A few months ago in August, Madonna had a concert in Romania where she tried to briefly talk to the crowd about how wrong such discrimination was. She was booed.

Also, Africa is definitely not known to be human-rights friendly, but one such story I came across recently caused me raise an eyebrow. Apparently, albinos are being killed in Burundi and Tanzania simply because they are albino. What the hell?

Asian cultures tend to hold some sort of traditionalistic view. However, of more noteworthiness, I suppose it's a recent phenomenon, but in Japan, older people are starting to become discriminated against more and more, possibly leading some elderly to commit suicide in larger numbers than before (the reasons for increasing elderly suicide rates in Japan are more complicated than simply age discrimination, of course).

So what I'm trying to convey through these examples is that in all different parts of the world, some type of discrimination still exists that would be viewed as outrageous by (some of) the other parts of the world. That said, given the "pervasive" support of democracy (or something that resembles democracy) by the more-developed nations of the world, democratic nations are allowing the general populace to vote with their biased collective mindsets on issues that should really only be legislated by the progressive, more-intelligent higher-ups. A great example here is gay marriage in America. It has never been passed (or kept) by popular vote. It has always been legalized through the legislative or the judiciary system.

This is an excellent place for this comic: http://xkcd.com/603/

So it seems to me that well-educated people tend to have more-progressive, less-discriminatory views that the general population does not share. But we still allow the general population to vote with their collective, biased mindsets on issues that affect everyone--"everyone" including people who might be biased against by the general population. I'd say that people right now aren't fully-educated enough to realize the non-progressiveness of some of their views. Even a marginally additional amount of open-mindedness could go a long way. But otherwise, we just aren't quite ready for democracy with our current population.


Other links of possible interest:

Another article on the Swiss vote (you need to have a NYTimes account to read it now):
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/30/world/europe/30swiss.html?_r=1&hp

(Anti-)Creationist comic
http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=1604



Unrelated music video! Here is Shayne Ward's "If That's OK With You." He's from England and was the winner of the second season of the British series The X Factor. I became a fan a couple of years ago from the song below, "No U Hang Up," and "Breathless." The non-single songs "Easy to Love You" and "Melt the Snow" from his first(-ish) and second albums, respectively, are also noteworthy listens.