LETTERS: CORRUPTION CAN SPELL THE DOOM OF DEMOCRACY

To the editor:

Is our democracy doomed? When the 13 colonies were still part of England, Professor Alexander Tyler wrote about the fall of the Athenian republic over 2,000 years previous:

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure. From that moment on the majority always votes for candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship."

According to Tyler, the average age of the world's great civilizations has been 200 years, and these nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith to great courage to liberty to abundance to selfishness to complacency to apathy to dependency back into bondage.

A quick look at our history shows strong parallels: from the Pilgrims to the Declaration of Independence to the Revolutionary War to liberty to abundance to selfishness (the Me Generation) to complacency (low voter turnout) to apathy ("I don't like Clinton, but the economy is good, so what the heck?")

Now we have an election where the candidate who promised the most money garnered the most popular votes. Our great nation, at over 200 years old, is seeing partisan judges overriding and adulterating the laws to impose partisan interpretations of how some people meant to vote.

When our laws can be manipulated to impose the will of a few politicians, we lose our freedom from the bondage of the powerful.

LARRY L. MYERS

Jackson, Mo.