Our elected politicians parade across the TV screen in starched white shirts, silk ties knotted splendidly, each hair groomed with sticky gels that cement it into its perfect place. That’s not what I want to see.

If we the people are dangling over a cliff – waiting for a Supreme Court decision, suffering from a dangerous disease, fearing deportation, drinking stinking water – our congressional representatives ought to have turned their jackets into ropes, tied their belts to a rock, scuffed their shoes looking for a toe hold and scratched the bejeebers out of their hands trying to hang on to the precipice. Instead of delivering sonorous sound bites for the 6 o’clock news, their voices should be raspy with the effort to effect a rescue.

If it ain’t messy, it ain’t democracy. Democracy is by definition a clamorous
clashing of points of view. Every belief is given a right to exist alongside the multitudinous beliefs of others; every fact coexists with access to misinformation and misguided conclusions.

On any given issue of the day –poverty, gun control, equal rights, environmental stewardship, the Middle East – no one has it right and yet everyone has something right. The truth hides in our collective understandings and perspectives. We won’t understand or achieve what is good for all unless we allow all the voices to speak and to be heard.

And then we have to listen. We have to hear what the other person is saying so clearly that we could put their opposing ideas into our own words, fully understood, grasped with the clarity of our own cherished beliefs. We have to be able to look at matters from one another’s standpoints, hopping back and forth between our own position and alternative positions with the fleetness of a flea hopping from bite to bite. Listening is effortful, folks. Effortful.

The true process of democracy makes being an elected politician look like child’s play because most of them do none of this work. They assume a pose and hold it for the camera.

If you want to know how true democracy looks and feels, consider what is happening on the internet. Because Wikipedia is an open format – anyone can contribute – it is unreliable as a source, containing misinformation, distortions and wild ideas. It’s messy. It is also a magnificent resource the likes of which had never before existed, an evolving global think tank full of passion as well as facts.

Look at sites that use our feedback to rate plumbers, repair shops, consumer products, vacation get-aways – and even the driver who just took you from grandma’s house to home. The voices of millions of ordinary people can be heard on the internet, holding one another publicly accountable for the quality of services and products.

Thanks to the internet, the once hallowed halls of giant publishing houses echo with silence. In just a few short years, their niche in the publishing industry has nearly disappeared as self-publishing and electronic publishing options have expanded. Gone are the gatekeepers. Publishing is now a democratic process, open to all. Anyone can start an on-line magazine, create a blog or publish an e-book.

That means, of course, that the market is being flooded with schlock along with very fine writing. People who can neither write nor think clearly are able to publish whatever they want. It’s up to the public to decide if a book or a blog is worth reading or not, and to spread the word either way.

The truth requires this back and forth between you and me, this willingness to do the work of evaluating problems and solutions from all perspectives. We can’t carve out a position, speak only from that position and stop listening to the ideas of others. Any fixed point of view is flawed by definition: right in some cases, wrong in others. The internet is a terrific tool for teaching us to take multiple sources into account and continually refine our thinking according to the perspectives available.

Living in a democracy doesn’t allow us to Velcro our chosen comfort zones onto our bodies like shields and wear them wherever we go. Be prepared to muck around in the messiness of our differences. Get your hands in that dirt. Think of it as soil that holds a million kernels of truth.