Fric Spruyt is a property owner and property manager in Brattleboro and a member of the town's energy committee.
BRATTLEBORO-It choked me up to hear that the Congressional Gold Medal has been awarded collectively to all Rosie the Riveters. They emerged at a time when we as a country needed to pull together, set aside our differences and prejudices for the common good.
These days, unanimous support for anything in our divided society is a minor miracle, yet our deeply dysfunctional Congress has agreed to honor these extraordinary women who stepped up when their country needed them.
Our country needs us again. This time the attack has taken a different form, but it is at least as serious as the attack on Pearl Harbor or 9/11.
It is a slow, steady attack on individuals, on institutions public and private, and on democracy itself.
It's perpetrated through the internet by enemies foreign and domestic, using scams, cyberattacks, and social media. A sign of its effectiveness is the degree to which it has been welcomed by many who consider themselves "freedom-loving patriots."
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I am not trying to say that things were great in the 1940s and 1950s - just that the trend was quite positive then.
We are still being led by imperfect leaders. Our founding fathers were slave-holding Christians who declared that all "men" were created equal - a radical idea for its time that eventually led to slave emancipation and women's suffrage.
The founding fathers warned against enemies from within as well as those from outside our borders. They warned equally against allowing religion too much influence over government and government too much influence over religion, in order to protect the sanctity of both.
They, however, could not possibly have imagined how today's technology could supercharge alliances between our enemies and bring out the worst instincts of people whose socialization happened largely online.
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Wise representatives from the entire range of the political spectrum are sounding the alarm. Once again, we must pull together as though we were under attack, because we are.
The preservation of democracy needs to be our first priority. It can be messy and unpredictable, but it's not rigid. We get regular opportunities to fix our mistakes.
We need only look at all those who have tried some version of autocracy, and are still trying it, to realize that things could be much worse. Despite our imperfect execution of self-governance, it's the one thing that truly has made us great.
Our grand experiment has inspired other nations around the world to follow suit. If and when we revive our Democracy, we can then return to the wonderfully messy and relatively peaceful process of sorting out how to govern ourselves.
To paraphrase Winston Churchill, "Democracy is the worst form of government ... except for all the others."
It has been 250 years since we freed ourselves from the reins of a monarchy that ruled and taxed us without our input. The lessons of that period of our history have never been more relevant.
So vote - as though your right to vote depended on it.
This Voices Viewpoint was submitted to The Commons.
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