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From Istanbul to Rio to Philly, this democracy thing is broken

People are taking to the streets (or going on hunger strikes) because it's getting impossible to effect change at the ballot box.

It was just the other day that we were celebrating the 24th anniversary of the unknown hero that the world knows simply as Tank Man. You know exactly what I'm talking about, the solitary protester in Beijing's Tienanmen Square, who refused to move in the face of four Chinese tanks involved in crushing a pro-democracy movement. The image "went viral" in 1989 before most people even had the Internet, because it spoke to both our fears and fantasies of the 20th Century -- a valiant stand for personal freedom in the face of a totalitarian government, a memorable battle in our long slow drive to bend the moral arc of the universe toward justice.

In 2013, the world is rallying behind...Standing Man. His name is Erdem Gunduz, a Turkish "performance artist" who yesterday strolled into the heart of Istanbul's Taksim Square, which had been cleared of protesters just the night before by Turkish police firing tear gas canisters and water cannons. At 6 p.m. local time, the Standing Man dropped his bag and stood completely still, staring straight at a giant portrait of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the godfather of modern Turkish democracy, and the Turkish flag. For the next eight hours, Gunduz did not move -- an act of defiance so simple, so dignified, that it electrified the nation. Some rushed to the square, others took up a solitary stance in the capital city of Ankara and elsewhere, and a few even stood with him in other nations around the globe.

The 21st Century was having a moment.

As the Standing Man's protest was winding down, several hundred thousands demonstrators were taking to the streets of Brazil.in a remarkable event. Maybe you've seen the amazing footage, the "if you build it, they will come" of protest videos, with peaceful nighttime marchers filling a wide boulevard in the heart of Rio de Janeiro as far as the eye could see, in both directions. In Rio, in Sao Paulo, in the capital Brasilia and elsewhere, demonstrators pushed their demands for affordable transit fares and for a government that responds to the needs of its people, and then vanished into the South American night, to regroup again.

Somewhere in between the Standing Man's night of solitude and the carnival-like frenzy of the streets of Rio is my own hometown of Philadelphia. At roughly the same time that Erdem Gunduz was walking into the Taksim Square, four people -- two parents and two other union activists -- sat down in front of an office belonging to Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett. The four announced that they are going on hunger strike -- taking in nothing but water -- until state and local officials act to restore funding to city schools, which have given pink slips to roughly 3,900 workers in a crisis that threatens to turn places of learning in America's fifth-largest city into giant understaffed warehouses for children.