ROTHENBURGER – Sometimes we elect fools, but we aren’t ruled by tyrants

GOING SOMEWHERE ELSE does one of two things. a) it gives us ideas about how things could be done better back home, or b) it makes us realize how good things are back home.

Having just returned from a trip to eastern Europe, I’m thinking very much in terms of option (b).

Hungary, for example, has experienced domination by both Nazism and Communism, and recently the ‘illiberal’ democracy of Viktor Orban. When we visited there, people were celebrating a change in government and experiencing hope for a better future.

In Croatia, the sad memories of war are very much alive. The Croatian War of Independence was little more than 30 years ago, won at terrible cost against the Serbia-controlled Yugoslavia People’s Army led by Slobodan Milosevic. We sat down in the home of a widow who remembers all too well fleeing from her village near the small city of Vukovar as the Serbian army closed in, and returning only to find everything ransacked, even the floor boards gone.

Stories are told of hundreds of prisoners of war being executed and buried in mass graves. On many streets, buildings remain destroyed or pock-marked from gunfire or bombings.

Across the Danube, Serbia still struggles to remake itself into a true democracy many years after the death of Milosevic and General Tito. There’s a joke there that goes like this: “In Japan, people know the result of an election within hours. In Germany, they know it within a day. In Serbia, they know it a month before.”

In Bulgaria and Romania, a certain percentage of the population longs for the old Communist days when people lived in fear but everyone had a job. We saw the opulent mansion of Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena, who were deposed and summarily shot in the Romanian revolution against Communist control in 1989.

These things happened within the lifetimes of many of us. I don’t pretend to become an instant expert from a brief visit to another country but such experiences make one realize how insignificant our little complaints back here in Canada and the Tournament Capital really are.

We look at what’s happening at City Hall or in Victoria or Ottawa and conclude there must be corruption or ulterior motives at the heart of all politics. I don’t believe it. Aside from occasional bad apples, our politicians are, in general, just doing their best. Sometimes for selfish reasons or ego, but not out of wicked intent against their fellow human beings.

We’re going to have a civic election here soon. It will be controversial but it won’t be rigged. Ballots will be cast and properly counted. We will all have a free vote on who represents us for the next few years.

Those we choose may show inspiring leadership, or disappoint us with their selfishness and lack of vision. The point of this little travelogue is that while, in this part of the world we may sometimes bear the burden of having elected fools, we do not suffer under the yoke of tyrants.

Mel Rothenburger is a former Kamloops mayor and a retired newspaper editor. He publishes the ArmchairMayor.ca website. Today’s column also appears in the Kamloops Chronicle.