A Reflection on Kenya

The latest from Kenya is that thirty people have been burned to death in a church in an incident assumed to be related to the country's election controversy. Violence has followed a vote in which the incumbent claims re-election while his challenger cries fraud. Their political parties have been described in the western media as if they are merely vehicles for tribal interests. This makes it easier, I suspect, for people to view the violence as a tantrum of sore losers. That would make Americans look good by comparison, perhaps, because a lot of us thought an election had been stolen and we didn't riot in the streets. Instead, we extolled the statesmanship of Al Gore, who would not have wanted to precipitate a constitutional crisis by challenging the Electoral College. But let's step back a second. It seems that, if you're convinced that an election was stolen, the constitutional crisis is already upon you. If so, then without calling for churches to be burned, I would still ask you what you intend to do about it? And I would think that, without people being murdered, there might still have been civil disobedience of some kind. Instead, everyone took their cues from Gore, who may well have determined to his satisfaction that the election had not been stolen in any actionable fashion. If that was the case, then there's no cause to call him a coward. Nevertheless, there are many people in the United States who to this day claim that the 2000 presidential election was, in one way or another, stolen, and all they've ever done about it, as far as I can tell, is write books and magazine articles. In effect, they have capitulated as completely as Al Gore did. The Kenyan opposition has not capitulated. Whether they're entitled to their refusal remains to be seen, but until the evidence is in, if it ever will be, we shouldn't let some people's tactics disqualify the general complaint.