The Tinkerbell effect

Peter Pan had a sidekick, Tinker Bell — a tiny fairy — Peter’s companion and confidante, flying about with him. To save Peter’s life, she swallows poison intended for him. Peter turns toward the audience as she begins to die and asks everyone, if they believe in fairies, to clap as loudly as they can to save her. Though Tinker Bell certainly couldn’t hear all of us clapping at home like crazy, our belief in fairies apparently did the trick, for in a matter of moments, she was once again darting about the stage.

Thus, the “Tinkerbell effect” came to mean that things exist only so long as we believe in them.

One might say, for example, that in our democracy, the rule of law has existed for over two centuries because enough of us believe in it. Once enough of us stop believing in it — that we’re not to be held accountable to it — then the rule of law will likely cease to exist. It’s been said that this effect — this believing — is like a strongbox that keeps our civic values safe: the sanctity of voting and elections, the separation of powers, the independence of the courts, our freedom to speak.

As a child, watching a fairy tale, it was merely doubting the existence of fairies that could make for a sad outcome in the plot. Now, as adults, to doubt and not believe that our system of government still works — which, according to polls, over half of us dangerously do — will lead our nation to a much more consequential ending.

Nothing has so sharpened my appreciation — and my belief — in our democracy as the desire, deep in my patriotic heart, to not want to be living in a time when our system of democracy fades from history’s stage — this stage we now trod upon, whose construction we owe to those before us, and that we must owe to all those who’ll come after us. For this place we call our nation will not simply vanish forever when we no longer act upon its stage. We must not deprive the generations who will follow of the revolutionary gift to which we have been heirs.

For me, one of democracy’s hardest tasks — defending the rights of those who espouse beliefs that aren’t my own — is something I intellectually understand, but find difficult to put into action. I talk a good game. But truth is told in the actions we take, and as a friend reminded me recently, we shouldn’t forget our obligation to our democratic conscience that, sometimes, is about choosing the harder right instead of the easier wrong. The harder right maintains that all sides are meant to be on the same side of the democratic project, which, finally, is an experiment that, so far, has remained viable for 250 years because we’ve believed in it.

“Democracy can only be saved by democratic women and men,” the journalist Dorothy Thompson wrote. “The war against democracy begins by the destruction of the democratic temper, the democratic heart.”

Recently, a sold-out crowd attended an event about the origins of the Constitution at the Burlingame Library. Beyond what was discussed, the very size of the gathering was what I found most heartening. It was one small example of citizens wanting to stretch their civic muscles, and the urgent need — in this perilous time and place, amidst the current tribal and political intolerance — for a vibrant, engaged community to understand how the governing of our democracy came to be and how it affects our personal lives. Perhaps, we should already know this. But it’s been years since most of us sat in a classroom half-listening as a teacher lectured about our country’s birth. It was easy then not to worry about how deeply we believed in a democracy because we simply took it for granted.

We cannot take democracy’s life for granted now, for its survival depends absolutely on our passionate, committed, and active belief in it, clapping as loudly we can to help it stay unceasingly aloft.

Mike Nagler taught for many years at Cañada College and was a member of the Burlingame Library Board and Foundation.