One supposes that the great challenge of daily life is to stay connected to those things that matter the most despite the nearly overwhelming temptation to turn away when the frustration level seems too great and the cost of trying to change something for the better seems impossible. That would seem like a fairly apt description of our modern political arena.
And I’ve got to confess that for quite a few years a long time ago, I turned my back on politics over just that level of frustration that left me with a feeling that nothing could be done to make a difference in a seemingly dysfunctional miasma that devoured our tax dollars and our optimism with matching ferocity.
I apologize for a ponderous lead, but the current effort by Republican legislatures across the country to curtail the 2012 vote by enacting scads of new measures designed to do just that has left me with a debilitating frustration that almost makes me feel young again. I was in my 30’s when I shielded my eyes from national politics for a decade or more; now I am all of 61 and I realize that such a maneuver – while perfectly understandable – can’t be an acceptable course.
Here’s a more inflammatory way of describing what is being undertaken in as many as two dozen states: Republican legislators are disgracing themselves and dishonoring the heroic servicemen and women who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last 10 years by enacting or proposing legislation that undermines the very democratic ideals that we so glibly espouse for our Middle East brethren.
While our young people die in the service of their country as they labor to spread democratic institutions into lands that have known little more than monarchy and despotism, cynical legislators propose voter ID laws in the United States that are precisely designed to suppress the vote from the poor, the young and the disenfranchised. This is a crudely constructed political device offered up as yet another desperate measure to unseat President Obama, brazenly pushed forward by a gaggle of incompetents who are devoid of any ideas that don’t center around tax cuts for the wealthiest among us and a pathological desire to disembowel social programs for the middle class and the poor.
It is proffered under the guise of combatting voter fraud, but there has been no appreciable increase in the kind of electoral shenanigans that these tawdry laws would ostensibly address. That’s a smokescreen, and not a particularly adroit one, nothing nearly so clever as weapons of mass destruction or trickle-down economics.
Since Republicans hold majorities in more than half the state legislatures, the continued avalanche of this kind of anti-democratic trickery is likely to continue, but we’ve got to do the best we can to stop it or otherwise react effectively. That may come down to developing massive, well-funded programs to help provide those very same disenfranchised and poor voters with the necessary tools to overcome the ID hurdles the Republicans are frantically laying out there.
Barack Obama startled a whole nation three years ago when he swept into the presidency with a unique understanding of modern social media; here’s hoping that the same geniuses who engineered that will come up with a workable way to counter the effects of this sinister bit of business from the right. Even having said it, it still leaves me awestruck that in this day and age when blood is being shed daily in the Middle East by average citizens yearning for democracy, our democratically elected knuckleheads here in the United States are laboring furiously to deny the vote to vast segments of the populace that they are convinced wouldn’t cast a vote their way on a bet.
God forbid that they instead devise voter-friendly policies that might tip the ballot in the quaint, old-fashioned way. Tamping down the very principles that we supposedly hold dear is much easier.
This very same group has been peeing on our leg for 30 years while insisting that it’s raining; it’s about time the rest of the country started realizing that – the pleasant, warm feeling notwithstanding – it’s up to us to either move our own leg or otherwise take measures to quell the not-so-golden shower.
- T.S. O’Connell