Is Democracy Meeting Our Needs?

Excerpts from Morning Tinto 7

Excerpts from Morning Tinto 7 with

Chris Musei-Sequeira

What is democracy? Isn't it that we get our voices heard, we get to participate in decision making? In the podcast, Srsly Wrong, they did a series on utopias. In the skit, a billionaire had been frozen and he wakes up decades later and there is a utopia. “Where's all my money?” People were asking him questions about what it had been like back then, when there were billionaires. “How could people decide on things that affected their lives if they only voted every four years? I don't understand. How does that work?” It doesn't work, does it?

What do we need to do to be able to ensure that everyone gets enough food? What are we doing to make sure that we get shelter, health care, a chance to do meaningful work? That has nothing to do with money. To be able to to look in your neighbourhood and say, “Who would I trust in this neighbourhood? Who would make some decisions on our behalf that would make sure that our water stays clean, that we have enough water, that there's food growing locally?” Instead, we have some strangers on a ballot, and you have so little control over who gets put on the ballot. That’s not democracy. It's just not democracy.

When I founded an organisation for refugees and asylum seekers in England, that was me noticing a need. That was me noticing that, on one level, I was watching the news and seeing what some call rightly call “the racism crisis”, but was called the refugee crisis, of all these migrants coming into Europe, mainly due to Syria, but it was a mixed group of people — and we were feeling helpless. And so my need was to contribute in some way, and I wanted to get that need met. And I could see there was a lot of need in people who were crossing over.

I went to The Jungle in Calais, France, a camp for migrants who were waiting to get somehow over to England, waiting to get on boats or trucks or whatever. And I went to that camp and saw everyone trying to meet each other's needs. They had built up like a little town out of tents, and some Afghanis had set up a restaurant. These are migrants who were doing that. People like me, the do gooders from outside France, would come and help, bring things, bring tents, bring clothes. There were places set up where people could go to say what they needed, and then people would try to find a way to meet the needs. That is an example of people really needing to survive in those conditions, with police repression, intimidation happening.

Of course, just like in any society, there's crime, there’s women needing to be safe. How can we create a space for women who've travelled alone to have a place where they can sleep? All of that was going on. It was really an amazing space. And they had a library. They were teaching. They had different places of worship. And, of course, it it got destroyed, because this is an example that threatens capitalism. You're not supposed to get your needs met by one another in this way.

But I went back to England more determined to do something. And that's why I founded the organisation. And I saw that there were people like me in our county in Lincolnshire, who wanted to do something. We wanted to help people, but our county wasn't a dispersal area for asylum seekers, for resettlement of Syrians or anything. So we created the organisation so that we could partner with organisations in larger cities who do have, who did have, asylum seekers and resettled Syrians so that they could come have holidays with us, have breaks, get out of the city and come to a rural area and stay with families. So that's meeting people's needs: both the needs for us to want to contribute in some way to a crisis, and for them to feel welcome into England, to get to know English culture, if they didn't already, and practice their English with families, go to the beach, all of that.

The next example would be COVID. I was in Sunderland in the UK when it hit and well, immediately, the government did put into place an app where you could volunteer. But, the point being, it was people needing to get medication or needing groceries because they couldn't leave the house because they were vulnerable. And so you would volunteer to go do that. There was a lot of trust involved, because it happened so quickly. COVID just hit, so it’s not like everyone could be vetted, which normally the UK would do. You have to go through a police check. It's all pretty tightly controlled. And this was a lot more like, “Okay, we need people. We're not gonna have time to do that.” To go to pick up someone's prescription and take it to their house and have a little conversation with them at the door: that’s meeting needs. Getting their groceries. It felt like a very vulnerable thing to tell someone what groceries you want, because people can judge you, your junk food and everything. We were going through a really stressful moment in history with a pandemic, and maybe we want to eat junk food, who cares? So there's that.

There are things happening in the US right now around how to provide abortions safely, especially when people can't cross the state line, because the police will question you if you're a young woman travelling across the state line. It's just really scary. And trans folks working out where the safest place to go is. People in Europe saying, well, it's getting worse here. I'm not sure where people should go to be safe.

So thinking about people's real, immediate needs. For safety, for safe health care, for shelter.

There are people who go to the border of Mexico and provide water and food to migrants. We’re talking some extreme cases of life or death: water, food.

Then other things like churches where folks take turns making food for someone who is ill. That's something that churches can do really well. And the far right is using churches as a place to provide mutual aid. And it's working. That brings people in, and it connects people, creates community. And the left doesn't really have that kind of easy pathway in to doing things. The left, they do do these things around mutual aid, trans support, abortion care, helping migrants, they're doing all of that. I think what's difficult is how someone would find their way into that work if they're not already well connected, because there isn't this rigid ideology that might pull people in through a church or one location where you're going to get people who think kind of along the same lines. The left is a bit more diverse and complex in that way. So I don't think we should go for rigid radicalism (referring to the book, Joyful Militancy), but I think people do naturally want to be of service and help others, and so going local in this way is really healthy and what it means to be human. And sometimes we're so disconnected and we don't know where to even begin.