Sunday October 13, 2024; 10:29 AM EDT
- Some sentences -- some explanations -- are reusable because society keeps making the same mistake. Other reusable sentences expose a social structure or a cause-and-effect relationship over here that also exists over there. This next partial sentence is surely one of those reusable ones.#
- ". . . almost no one knew how these things worked and thus [most people] had no idea what was possible."#
- For example, in Czechoslovakia, in about three weeks in 1989, through a series of increasingly larger public protests, a decades-old, iron-handed, and seemingly stable dictatorship was overthrown. Hundreds of thousands of people who at the start of those three weeks were not politically active, and who were not politically organized, participated in forcing a change of government. Media censorship was lifted, huge numbers of people who were not in the habit of taking chances and standing up in public began to stand up in public, and police, the secret police, and the military, all long accustomed to enforcing the will of the dictatorship, eventually stood down.#
- These were not mystical events, though most people have never looked into them. Not many people know how these things work, and so most people probably don't think these sorts of things are possible. #
- Nevertheless, events like the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia offer clues to mechanisms that can sometimes create or preserve a democracy.#
- PS. The slightly reworded quotation above comes from a recent blog post by Dave Winer.#