How Soon is Now
The last time I saw so many people gathering together, I was completely naked and the nature of the meeting was quite different to what I was involved in yesterday. The readers of the Filter^ generally, and rightly, take universal suffrage for granted, but for the people of Hong Kong, it is merely a promise, first from London, and now, from Beijing.
Along with 250 thousand other Hong Kong people, I walked along the busiest parts of Hong Kong island, admiring the orderly manner of the protest. Lots of slogans were chanted, and as expected with so many people involved, I disagreed with a fair portion of them (I mean, it's not really my belief that Buddhism should replace the Communist party in China or that children from the age of 11 should have the rights to vote!)
Check out the coverage of the protest on Google News. And don't listen to the official figure: there were far more than 68,000 participants yesterday!
Although I completely agree with universal suffrage as it's typically defined, it strikes me that it's not universal at all. It's only for sane, non-criminal, non-immigrant human adults.
It seems that in the past, prior to the vote being extended to women or the working class, the exact same arguments were being made - they're stupid, uninformed, incapable of rational political thought etc
When it comes to suffrage "universal" seems to be a word employed by the elite to convince the rest of us that we're being fairer than we are.
Posted by: AJE | December 05, 2005 at 04:53 PM
I read the story, and was bemused by this statent: "One police officer was hospitalized for 10 days with a fractured foot".
It's not even broken! People fracture bones in their feet all the time, and usually just carry on dancing. You don't spend ten whole days in hospital if you've broken both legs! Jesus.
Posted by: Thomas Conolly | January 10, 2006 at 12:50 PM