Voice of the Future-Scholarship Winners
Voice of the Future
Deadline: March 2008
Scholarship winners have been chosen and contacted. Listed below are three of the five essays that were selected for scholarships. The other two authors have decided that they would not like to be featured on our website or in our publication. Thank you to all who participated. The judges had a very difficult time deciding scholarship allocation.
DRACHMAS, DOLLARS AND THE DEATH OF DEMOCRACY…
In 399BC, Socrates was condemned to death. Ever since, the murder of the “wisest, justest and best of all men” has been attributed to democracy: the crime of the unruly masses and the need for them to be governed. Yet, perhaps before rendering a verdict one should inquire: Why was Socrates brought before justice and why was he condemned?
Today, democracy is trumpeted as the only viable political form. Its very enunciation seems to conjure an irrevocable legitimation. It has become the rallying cry of the oppressed, the battle-standard of the righteous and the yardstick by which we measure political orthodoxy: to be branded undemocratic is to be politically excommunicated. What is then democracy and what has it become?
If the meteoric rise in the cost of electoral campaigns is a testament to anything, it is a testament to the loss of freedom in our societies. For freedom is not a mere word, it is a reality. A citizen who cannot afford to participate and compete is no freer to govern than a single rower is free to steer a galley. The essence of freedom is not the absence of obstacles to our aspirations, but the presence of the means to achieve them.
As a result, it is indubitable that the private funding of electoral campaigns barricades those means behind a patrician palisade to which wealth is the watchword. The very nature of private funding entails the satisfaction of private interests and their predominance over the public interest. Just as the interest of a single family member is not the best interest of the family, so the interests of the few and the wealthy are not the interest of the Nation. War is profitable to the weapons peddlers, disease to the pill peddlers and destitution to the dream-peddlers, but what profit do these calamities bring the people?
If money, rather than merit, becomes the prerequisite to election, then our representatives will be accountable to their financiers and not their electorate. This would not be the case if every citizen could raise his voice and be heard, but the magnitude of our country renders the media necessary to the debate. Yet, the media is not a charity; it is a private industry. As the cost of discussion rises, the means to discuss diminishes and the clash of ideas becomes a barrage of bottom-lines and sound bytes. Ergo, by subjugating the means of public discussion to the private domain, the private interests will dictate the future of the Nation.
Therefore, the rising cost of democracy is the rising cost of Freedom and if the conditio sine qua non of freedom is the ability to act, then the rising cost of electoral campaigns is the denial of the freedom of self-government. When democracy is beyond the means of a single citizen, then the power of the people becomes the price of the people. If such is the case, then perhaps drachmas, not democracy, killed Socrates.
Renaud-Philippe Garner
IN A WORLD OF NEW FOUND WEALTH
Throughout the vast majority of human history, essential resources of all kinds have been scarce––food, clean water, shelter. If all the resources of the world were spread equally amongst the people, it would have been insufficient for anyone to live. For humanity to survive, a few benefited while many languished. Slavery, serfdom, warring states and ethnic hatreds were the status quo. Life was a wretched, barbaric reality for most humans.
Tragically, the predatory nature of man against his kin was necessary for civilization’s advancement. Without the luxury and free time afforded the upper classes through the oppression of the weak, most of the sophistication of modern society could never have been achieved. Free from worry of starvation or assault, wealthy sheiks a millennium ago pondered the motion of the stars and the intangible properties of numbers. Algebra and astronomy began amongst a world of suffering. The development of advanced engineering and architecture required exploitation of feudal serfs to build the castles and cathedrals of the prosperous.
The oppression sewn through our culture and civilization remains unshaken. What humanity has failed to recognize is that the predatory nature of mankind is no longer necessary. We can finally feed, clothe, and protect the vast masses of our species. Science and technology provide us with the tools to create resources never before available to us. In the last few decades alone, agricultural biotechnology has provided the means to double global food production.
Simultaneously, electrical technology has allowed us countless methods to obtain energy––hydroelectric, nuclear, wind power, solar power. We have traveled to the moon and changed the speed of light. We have calculated pi to a million digits and connected the entire world through a digital network. We have cured infection with antibiotics and replaced limbs with functional robotic prostheses. Why, for all our capabilities, do some of us live in opulence and others in destitution?
Over thousands of years, a sickness of culture gripped humanity. Class struggle purged the fundamental compassion for our fellow humans from our minds. Our society forgot that ideally, all people should be able to feed their families. The rich may deserve the spoils of their success. Conversely, do the poor deserve to be poor? By its nature, free market capitalism allows individuals to become wealthy, and simply taking advantage of this opportunity is not wrong. However, paying cripplingly low wages when fully able to pay a livable wage is wrong. To cling to archaic notions of mercantilism in a world lush with newly developed resources is to betray humanity, binding us to our barbaric past and denying us the utopian future we all deserve.
Stuart Ballard
THE STABILITY OF HAPPINESS
How can we measure stability? In our age of globalization, a truly independent country is almost impossible to find. Through trade, travel, war, migration, and the spread of technology, we are all inextricably linked. A drought and subsequent grain shortages in China can affect a pizza shop in Rome, while the outcome of elections in the United States will influence a rural fishing community in Nicaragua.
Because the stability of each country is so interlinked with other countries, citizens must be the fuel in their own nation’s fire of stability. While outside influences cannot be controlled, how a population responds to these fluxes in economy and politics is something of their own making. Thus the stability of a country largely depends on the stability of its citizens. The Kingdom of Bhutan, a small nation located high in the Himalayas between India and China, is a country that places value on exactly this sort of personal stability. In 1972, Bhutan's King Jigme Singye Wangchuck came under criticism for the slow growth of his economy. When he responded that "Gross National Happiness” is more important than Gross National Product (Ezechieli, Eric 2003) the concept of GNH or Gross National Happiness, was born.
In the more than thirty years since the term was coined, Bhutan has shown the world that there are more important things than economic prosperity. King Jigme Singye Wangchuch understands the necessity of wealth, but does not automatically equate riches with happiness. He believes that material growth and spiritual growth must happen together for a population to be truly satisfied. Respecting the country's strong Buddhist values may come at the cost of rampant material growth, but materialism isn't the only casualty of Bhutan's ideology. Western influences have also been limited, with television and the Internet only introduced to the country in 1999 (Ezechieli 2003). This is all in an effort to protect the distinct culture and traditional values of the Bhutanese people, whose unique civilization is a strong source of national pride.
Economic self-reliance, environmental preservation, cultural protection, and good governance are the four pillars of Bhutan's Gross National Happiness, which are serving the population well. This year, the country will enter into its first democratic election since King Jigme Singye Wangchuck decided to abdicate the throne in December 2006 (Revkin, Andrew 2005). With a philosophy that focuses on happiness and sustainable growth, the Bhutanese people continue to prosper; a 2005 survey reported 97% of the population considered themselves "happy or very happy", while only 3% identified as "unhappy" (Revkin, Andrew 2005). Though they enjoy a relatively modest standard of living, the Bhutanese are considered to be in the top 10% of the world in terms of satisfaction of life.
A happy, secure population can weather the storm of political and economic ups and downs. A country comprised of satisfied individuals can persevere through economic depression and political unrest, and, above all, a happy population can provide stability to a nation in an otherwise unstable world.
Sarah Roe
The following winner(s) list is derived from our most recent scholarship opportunity. If you are interested in viewing past winner(s) of the scholarship program (ie. prior to March 2008), click here.