Charles Jaco has written opinion and commentary pieces for dozens of magazines and newspapers. Each week, read and comment on a fresh on-line version. The discussion page enables you to share your view points world wide. If you would like to make a comment go to the " Join the discussion" link below. If you would like to view past editorials visit the Editorial Archive. Editorial 10/06/00 ELECTIONS? CHANGE THE CHANNEL. We're peaceful. We're prosperous. We don't vote. Co-incidence? The Russian 82 mm "Hound" mortar weighs in at around 100 pounds. Each round is about 15 pounds. We figured it must have been a three-man crew, since they only fired seven rounds, which is probably about all they could have carried. The maximum range is a shade over two-and-a-half miles, so they might have been set up anywhere in the folded hills above Tejutla. 1982's election was the first time Roberto Fonseca had voted. Threats from the FMLN guerillas and terror from El Salvador's right-wing death squads had managed to squash most attempts at democracy in Salvador. But Fonseca had walked five miles to vote, and a mortar attack wasn't going to stop him. He threw himself down in the mud, along with several hundred other people lined up to vote, covered his head with his arms, and waited. The attack was over in a minute and a half. One round blew up an old stone wall, another gouged out a crater in an asphalt parking lot, another stippled our rental car with shrapnel. The rest careened wildly but harmlessly into a corn field. Fonseca checked to make sure his identity card was still in his pocket, stood up, and waited in line another hour to vote. Hundreds of thousands of Serbs in the streets of Belgrade are risking everything for democracy. Brave men and women from El Salvador to South Africa to East Timor have taken their lives in their hands to vote. Millions more from North Korea and Cuba to Afganistan and China can only dream of voting in open elections. And what about citizens of the most powerful and prosperous republic in the history of mankind? Fewer than half of the eligible voters even take the time. Sorry, Jack, I can't be bothered. The weather's bad. My kid has the sniffles. WWF Smackdown is on. I'm too busy. My vote won't make any difference. Ad nauseum. We've become victims of our own success. We won the Cold War, we've acheived a stunning level of material wealth, we're insulated from the world's hot spots by Canada, Mexico, two oceans, and the planet's most powerful military. Maybe because of that, we don't feel compelled to vote. We complain. God knows, we complain. Talk radio is chock full of people who think the system's rigged, so there's no point. When you see Pat Buchanan and Harry Browne and Ralph Nader kept out of the presidential debates, you figure they just might have a point. But then you see demonstrators slugging it out with police on the steps of Yugoslavia's burning parliament building. You see young Peruvians climbing atop the Presidential Palace gates in Lima, forcing President Fujimori to leave power and disavow the election he stole. You remember pro-democracy demonstrators in Poland and East Germany and Romania and Czechoslovakia, risking everything for even a chance at democracy. And you remember Roberto Fonseca, splattered with mud, wiping the drizzle from his eyes, hardly glancing at a mortar shell's smoldering crater, standing in line, waiting, waiting to vote. And you feel very proud of them. And very ashamed of us. Join the discussion

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