Sunshine protects our democracy

Sunshine protects our democracy

“Sunshine on My Shoulders” is a favorite bedtime lullaby in our house. “Sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy. Sunshine in my eyes can make me cry. Sunshine on the water looks so lovely. Sunshine almost always makes me smile.”

Ok. I’m no John Denver. I only know one verse and I’ve changed the words a bit to my liking. But it’s a comforting tune, and always leaves us feeling more peaceful. It rings rather true right now as the dark days of winter give way to much lighter days of spring.

Already, we have two more hours of sunlight than we did just a few months ago. Ahhhhhhh -- it feels so good.

I recently heard something interesting about sunshine that had never occurred to me. Sunlight illuminates everything for us, but is invisible itself. We can see the source of light, of course, the sun. And to some extent we can see rays streaming from it. But a ray of sunshine is invisible to our eyes. We can not reach out and touch it.

This is sunshine week in the media – a time to celebrate the importance of having a free and independent media that has ready access to the records and meetings and lawmaking processes of our government.

In America, the business of government, at least a vast majority of it, is conducted openly – in the sun. The laws protecting the openness of these processes are often referred to as “sunshine laws.”

Now, unless your name is Jack MacDonald (the lobbyist for the North Dakota Newspaper Association) or you work for a news organization, protecting sunshine laws probably isn’t high on your list of priorities.

This issue is a bit like the sun for most people. We don’t see it or think about it and take for granted these protections will always exist.

About 10 years ago, I had the opportunity to spend three weeks traveling and learning about the struggles of establishing a democracy in a place where this form of government was entirely new. I was in Bulgaria, which at the time was trying to create a viable form of democratic government after years of communist rule by the Soviet Union.

I was illumined, to say the least, by the challenges this and all Soviet block countries faced after the “walls” came down. The biggest difficulty wasn’t setting up schools, building infrastructure or delivering healthcare. It was far more fundamental than that.

Their toughest battle was creating a fair and just legal system that people could trust. Bulgaria’s legal system was fraught with corruption. Their fledgling economy limped along under the absence of legal, enforceable contracts that businesses could count on. Criminals could buy their way out of jail.

And many of the people charged with fixing these challenges, the government leaders, were accustom to operating in the dark and resisted being unaccountable to the people who elected them. They could pad their own pockets freely, reward their friends and protect their own future. Without the threat of legal consequences, these people had little motivation to change.

I learned in Bulgaria that a sound, impartial legal system is the foundation for everything in a democracy. Sunshine laws are a vital part of this. Like sunlight itself, we take them for granted, but our country would be awfully dark without them.