The Common Peace

Not long ago... ok, it was nearly twenty years ago... I was in Iraq working with the tribes as we were trying to bring peace to a long-troubled land. One time I had a conversation in my bad French and a tribesman's bad English (but very good French) about Thomas Jefferson. We talked about different ways of approaching democracy, of trying to achieve fairness in outcomes, of trying to get past Sunni/Shia or Arab/Kurd/Persian divisions, as well of course as resolving the old unsettled tribal feuds that were behind a lot of the trouble. 

I think about that a lot these days. 

Tomorrow the Republican party here locally is holding a candidate debate and meet-and-greet for the candidates for sheriff. They have decided, the GOP, to rent a private room so they can close the event except to registered Republicans, who are supposed to present their voter registration card at the door. A local GOP party official has been posting on Facebook about having Democrats who show up arrested for trespassing, and has alluded to the possibility of pepper spray being employed against them.

Now I should mention that, although this is a primary election, there are only the two Republican candidates; whoever wins the Republican primary will be the sheriff. That is partly a failure by Democrats to field a candidate, but it does have the effect of eliminating both Democrats and unaffiliated voters from the chance to see the candidates debate for the quite important public office. The decision to privatize a public good is coherent with a lot of Republican ideas -- some of which I agree with, such as privatizing public education given the collapse of the effectiveness of the public education system in much of the country -- but here many citizens will be excluded from even listening to the discussion. 

It seems to me that upholding the common peace, which allows us to debate and discuss our problems together even when we disagree, is a matter very much germane to the question of who would make a better sheriff. It's certainly something we should be thinking about; that common peace seems somewhat frayed of late.