“OXI” AND YES

by Dimitri C. Michalakis

It was in the middle of the night on October 28, 1940 that the Italian ambassador to Greece, Emanuele Grazzi, left a party at his embassy and visited Ioannis Metaxas, the prime minister of Greece. He had an ultimatum: allow the Italian army to enter Greece and take over “strategic” locations or there would be war. The legend is that Metaxas said, “Oxi,” to the proposal. The reality is that Metaxas said, in the French of diplomacy, “Then it is war.”

The next morning the Greeks took to the streets and shouted “Oxi!” and “Oxi” Day has been celebrated ever since.

Long before that, the Persian king Darius in 491 B.C. sent his ambassadors to the Greek city states vying for their freedom and demanding “earth and water”: the traditional token of submission. Unfortunately for the ambassadors, the Athenians put them on trial and then executed them, and the Spartans threw them down a well, but democracy was defended.

The Colonials of the American colonies told King George what to do with his tea and his proposed taxes by throwing his tea in Boston Harbor and tarring and feathering the king’s tax collectors.

Establishing, and maintaining, a democracy is a bloody business. But as Winston Churchill said: No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…

At a time of barbarism and autocracy, where ordinary people were no more than slaves, the ancient Athenians created democracy, where each individual (albeit male) had a voice. At a time of barbarism and fascism, where the ordinary citizens of the world were threatened with genocide, the world rose up and defended freedom and human rights. At a time of kings and queens and their theocracy, the American democracy declared itself against all odds and became the most successful democracy in history: we’ve earned the right to be heard and cast our votes.

Please cast your vote whatever your persuasion and say Yes to democracy. You have a right to be heard, you have the right to determine not only your future, but the future of the loved ones in your family. There are countries in the world right now, where people have no rights—where they live in dictatorships and theocracies and have about as many rights as the peasants of Anatolia had during the reign of the Persian kings. We in America have a voice, and the older generations have an obligation to convince their sons and daughters and disaffected friends that they have a voice, a critical one: they are the so-called independents and undecideds that might determine this American election. Kids don’t want to participate in the system because they think the system doesn’t represent them: the system represents all those who vote, and very often the best in people in times of world-changing crisis.

As one thinker put it: “Democracy is based upon the conviction that there are extraordinary possibilities in ordinary people.”