Democracy is fragile - by Mark Wilson

I grew up in a single parent household and my mother, during her long life, never voted. Like nearly half of potential American voters, she thought politics was like wrestling with a pig. You only get dirty, and the pig likes it.

Two months after I started high school in Whittier, California, Richard Nixon, our former local congressman, was elected President of the United States of America. It wasn't long before being drafted and possibly dying in the Vietnam War inspired me to become politically active. Before my senior year, the 26th amendment to the Constitution was passed, lowering the voting age to 18. I wasn't old enough to vote for George McGovern in 1972, but I voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976. I have voted in every election since.

I remember attending an election party in the bottoms of West Oakland in 2008. Like all of Oakland, it was amazingly diverse, with young people of all cultures mixing with the older black residents. While I've seen many people angry over an American election, that was the only time I'd ever seen people shed tears of joy at the outcome of an election.

At President Obama's urging in his first State of the Union address, and after years of being under and unemployed, I decided to return to college to upgrade my skills. I chose Laney Community College in Oakland for its Entrepreneurship Program and the diversity of its students. Being an adult returning student was such an awful experience, I joined with the student leaders to create a District-wide student council to address students’ problems across the college district’s four colleges. We led the reform of financial aid, trained more student leaders, and served on College and District governing committees. We met regularly with the District’s Chancellor and pressured him into reinstating the Campus Life Directors, crucial to student support and governance, that had been eliminated through budget cuts.

For two years I organized the federally-mandated Constitution Days on my campus. We had guest speakers from the faculty, staff, and student leadership, sharing their thoughts on politics and the US Constitution. We invited the League of Women Voters and they had a table where students could register to vote. The student government also had a table where elected student representatives encouraged students to join clubs and explained the process to campaign for election to the student government.

Unfortunately, after our unusually active group of student leaders transferred or graduated, the administrators allowed the student governments we had so successfully used to improve campus life and student outcomes to devolve into disarray, again. I learned firsthand how fragile democracy can be and offer this story as a cautionary tale of how establishment institutions will wait out any social movement and return to ‘normal’, albeit with minor improvements, to defend their privilege.