Why It Is Important to Keep Democracy Alive

I've always been chided for airing my views about the importance of checks and balances here. "Why bother to vote? It's already very good here." "How can we betray the government who has done so much for us?" "We have the best people leading us, we don't need a thriving opposition." I agree that we have a world class government, a great leader who brought us from the swarms of third world to become a world class city. We have come a long way. If I had been born in Malaysia, Thailand or China, or even Taiwan or South Korea, I would not have had the same opportunities.

But history counts little towards our efforts to make our nation state even better. The government needs to be more responsive to the needs of the people that are reasonable. Laws must be tweaked to be more just. More checks and balances must be in place to ensure that no one person will become so powerful in future that he is above the law. The push to democratise must continue. Our system will evolve our way, not necessarily mirrored after the west.

I like the Gettysburg Address because it encapsulates the spirit of the Americans that made them the greatest nation for over 150 years. Here it is again.


The Gettysburg Address
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom— and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.