I really did not think of today as the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese that began our entry into World War II as combatants.  The temperature was in the 40’s, so I bundled up to take my morning ride before the sun was really up. As anniversaries go, this one was heralded by a nor’easter that hit my old stamping grounds, the continuing war that was over months ago and was overshadowed by the two hundredth anniversary of the Lewis and Clark expedition to open up the west to American expansion.  As anniversaries go, this one will be eclipsed further as those of us who fought in it die off.

I got to thinking about things and this is the norm for me early in the morning.  One is that I found a dearth of willing apartment owners to be appointed to a three person “elections committee” to oversee the collection of sealed ballots at our Annual Meeting as they were logged in by a professional management company.  Last night I began calling people on my telephone list that is patently old and out of date. I found that the numbers either never existed or were falsified OR I got them wrong.  In the process of asking people if they would serve on the committee, I discovered that few would be able to even if they wanted to become members.  Our people work late or in two jobs.  They had prepared proxy ballots but could not serve.  Finding people to oversee an election to insure that it would be legal and honest is not easy.  If I had a bigger pool of potential appointees, perhaps I would have had better luck.  I may have to go with two, although both had problems in either being disinterested or discomfited by having to arrive early to begin overseeing the operation.

Democracy is a fragile thing.  Our concepts of what it means have changed from the days the Greeks defined it and the revolutionaries here in British Colonies worked to create a new nation.  It has changed further to be the cause celebre of our current president to include nations that have never experienced allowing individual freedom and people actually choosing their own representatives to do their bidding. The random experience of exporting the idea of our experiment to South America ushered in almost two hundred years of trying to get it right. Some of those countries got it right, some still haven’t. I sometimes am not sure if we have.

At the conclusion of World War II (begun for us on 12-07-1941), democracy was installed in Germany, Italy and Japan over the next decades.  It seems to work and the experiment in the Middle East MIGHT work, - or backfire.  We shall have to wait and see. Anniversaries are tricky.  Our memories play tricks on us.  Wars to save the world for democracy are different from those to save our backsides.