Do You Think It May Be Time to Try Democracy?

Today the New York Times offered a video interview with folks from UK, Australia, South Africa, and Germany on the subject of voting in America compared with the way they do things over there. They were appalled at the tricks some Americans have used to keep other Americans from voting.

It is almost always Republicans trying to stop Democrats from voting, but not always. Democrats have also had their day when it comes to gerrymandering, but never resulting in anything quite like the crazy quilt Republicans have created in various states to water down the Democratic vote in urban areas.

And today the Republicans in Texas are trying to have 127,000 ballots thrown out charging that curbside voting is illegal as it is being administered in Harris County. Not just stopped. Thrown out.

Clearly, the people who are in charge and calling themselves Republicans today have no respect for your opinion. They are not just anti-Democrat, they are antidemocratic, if you get the distinction.

The constitution offers no guidance to the states on how they are to allocate house seats, so they use the process to sustain whichever party is in power. We do not have to tolerate that. Any clever high school student equipped with a little knowledge of the constitution and an understanding of democracy could draw fair lines that equally represent a state’s voters. Surely we have Harvard and Yale educated people who can handle the job so high schoolers don’t have to waste their time while they should be paying attention to their on line classes.

And the electoral college just needs to go. I am tired of the years of being ignored in presidential elections because Texas has been considered so safely in the Republican column that the candidates invested no time or money here. (Ah, but they were more than willing to take the money out.) In fact, three of the nation’s most populous states have little bearing on the outcome of presidential elections (New York, Texas, California) because they are balanced against oppositely aligned “safe states”. That has the effect of lowering the level of interest in those states and, over time, the slow death of meaningful democratic participation. So, dump the electoral college. There are other ways to see that minorities are not overrun by majorities. You don’t address that problem by rendering meaningless the votes of the majority.

This presidential election year has very nearly rendered me silent. I have freely expressed my opinion but there seemed little point in spelling out my reasons in these little op-eds. If you read from America’s rich resources of real journalism, most of what needs to be said is being said. There is not much I can add that doesn’t look like a low form of name-calling.

The trouble is, it would all be true. He really is an idiot, coward, bully, narcissistic thug, etc. All those things. And so are his accomplices in the senate. But I demean myself when I offer that as my contribution to political discussion. Alas, there is not much more that can be said of the folks in power on the Republican side of the aisle.

I have watched horse-race reporting on news channel political talk shows and they appear intent on making the race as exciting as they can. So I have lately tuned them out. I will watch the returns on Tuesday night and all the way through January 20 if it takes that long.

Unfortunately, DJT has almost sold me on the proposition that the only way the other side can win is if the election is rigged. He has said it so frequently that we all come to believe it and, now, if he actually won, who would ever believe it? Certainly there is a great deal more evidence of pro-Republican fix than anything the Democrats could pull off if they were so inclined.

So why not give democracy a chance? It’s time after 231 years and a civil war.

We were once held out as the gold standard of democracy. Now they laugh at us. Think about that. Germany and South Africa are laughing at the America that stood as the model for hard won democracies in those countries.

A Thought for Today from the Poetry Foundation

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/147345/apologies

Apologies

BY KARENNE WOOD

I.
The time has come for the nation to turn
a new page by righting wrongs of the past.

We apologise for laws and policies that inflicted
profound grief, suffering, and loss and for the removal
of children from families, communities, and country.

For the pain of these, their descendants, and for families
left behind, to mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters,
for indignity inflicted on a proud people, we say sorry.

We resolve that the injustices of the past must never,
never happen again and look to a future based on mutual
respect, where all, whatever their origins, are equal partners.

Spoken by Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd,
introduced in January and delivered November 29, 2008,
the day after he was sworn into office

Classtime for White Folks

Yes, I mean white folks. That may sound a little crude or you may even think racist. But this post is addressed to everyone who racializes themselves or is racialized by others as white. If you checked the box next to the word “WHITE” on item 9 of your 2020 United States Census form, then this is a video you need to watch.

In this video, Jeffery Robinson, ACLU Deputy Director and an experienced trial attorney, speaks on the topic “The Truth About the Confederacy and the United States.” If you grew up in Texas or any other Southern state, it has been taught to you that the Civil War was not about slavery and that flying the Confederate battle flag is nothing more than a salute to our wonderful history, southern gentility, and tradition.

States’ rights, according to this version of history, was the driving force that led the South to secede and make war against the odious abolitionists of the North whose cause was to undermine the southern economy.

The video runs a little over an hour and forty minutes but it is worth your time.

Mr. Robinson has a more precise term for the grand tradition that the Confederate battle flag stands for: white supremacy.

In case you didn’t see the link above: https://youtu.be/QOPGpE-sXh0

Leave a comment and let me know what your think.

The World Burns with Moral Outrage: What Is a 76-Year-Old White Man to Do?

I am probably becoming all too comfortable with my coronavirus-imposed solitude. I have rather enjoyed turning my home in Lake Jackson into my own little hermitage. But how can one not get out and do something while the rest of the world rages in the streets in the call for justice. Something besides calling a U.S. Senator’s office and letting off steam to a 25-year-old aide.

It seems especially important to act because, frankly, so little is expected of someone occupying a slot in my demographic. White, Vietnam-era veteran, not rich but comfortable in retirement. A Texan living in the reddest of red districts, who has been represented in Congress by Dr. Ron Paul and Tom DeLay. Whose school district issued a diploma to Rand Paul, the close friend and colleague of Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. Really now, wouldn’t you expect me to be ensconced in that mass of voters popularly known as “Trump’s base”?

Well, that’s not the case. And I feel remiss for not being on the street doing more.

But there is one thing I can do that will not expose me COVID-19 and it will not encourage more of those little carcinomas I have to watch for so carefully. It won’t hurt those aging bones in my legs, hips and back. And it is something anyone, at least a white person, can do without exposure to police violence. Better yet, it does not involve posting or re-posting memes that will embarrass my family. This is so easy no one else will probably even notice your action. Yet it may be the most effective thing you can do to combat racism in the United States.

I got the idea from an opinion piece I read in the New York Times the other day. The article by Dr. Kihana Miraya Ross carried the title “Call It What It Is: Anti-Blackness.”

Pages: 12

My Post-Pandemic To-Do List for America

For the last few days I have been musing about the things that clearly need to be repaired as soon as the pandemic subsides, Congress re-assembles and DJT is an unpleasant chapter in our history. I started this list on April 28 and I will continue until I run out of ideas. The list may seem like a partisan list of Democratic Party objectives. It is not. I think everyone may have learned something about America, our national purposes, and the way we are governed. I plan to delve into many areas of our social and religious lives.

I invite your reading and comments. Trolling is not helpful. Please don’t do that.

Day 25 of Lake Jackson Lockdown

From time to time, I used to do thought experiments in which I would watch the president and pretend that I am a supporter. I didn’t try for the mind set of one of the Republicans in the Senate who may actually have something to gain from their obsequiousness, but rather more like a member of “The Base,” — one of his adoring fans who attend his rallies, wear MAGA hats, get most of their political input from Fox News or Rush Limbaugh, and have everything to lose by pumping up his ego and giving him power over their lives.

Friends, don’t do it. Don’t try to pretend you are a Trumpist. At first I thought it would be good to try to see the world from their point of view but I gave it up as a dangerous experiment. When I tried it, it made me a basket case. I felt I had leapt right into that basket of —dare I say it?— deplorables. .

I don’t know how anyone can watch his recent coronavirus daily briefings without concluding that he operates below the knowledge level of most fourth graders, possesses the language development of a 1980s citizen band enthusiast, the manners of a pro wrestler, and the leadership skills of a low level mobster.

He was elected as the head of our government and he knows less about it than most of the college freshmen I encountered in my basic government classes. When I read his remarks in print later, I grade them as kindly as I can and give him a D. And that is giving him a little extra credit for knowing a few bits of presidential trivia. What color is the presidential mansion? What shape is the president’s office? What is the name of the first African-born American president? He gets creativity points for that last one.

We are in Day 25 of our coronavirus lock-in here in Lake Jackson and after several days of watching the afternoon briefings from the White House I stopped watching. When I pretended that I was part of the president’s fan base they turned my brain into one of those mushroom soup casseroles that are a staple of Methodist pot lucks. But just watching them as an average citizen trying to stay informed was doing the same thing. There seemed to be no point in adding to his ratings since there was no useful information to be gained and I risked tipping his rating scale up one more tiny point by tuning in.

So I wait for the morning papers and read the reports in my internet editions of The New York Times and Washington Post. I read a little in the Houston Chronicle and The Facts. I pay for all of those but I freeload on The Guardian. They do the best job of keeping up with their own copycat Trumpist P.M. who has this day gone into the ICU with his case of Covid-19. I appreciate The Guardian and I do not enjoy admitting that I freeload on their journalism but my priority is to support the press in this country first. The queen never claimed the press was the enemy of the people.

Aside from reading in the mornings and catching up with news analysis on cable (Go ahead and guess!) in the evenings, we have been cleaning out the garage.

What a joy it is to go through old photographs and see my sisters, both of them little girls standing in the front yard of our house on Flaxman Street in Jacinto City. To graduate from high school again. To re-live some college years. What an adventure to live again in 1968, to feel the pain of being drafted and leaving a young wife on her own. To hold once again those precious band medals and the trophies from gymnastics meets, math competitions, and more. To read the poetry and science fiction my son wrote in junior high.

One of his science fiction stories was about a US biological warfare lab that had developed both the killer virus and, so they thought, the vaccine. A former president who had authorized the venture wanted to see the dramatic tests at the end of their experimentation. To make a short story even shorter, the virus succeeded but the vaccine did not. One of the infected monkeys went berserk after being stuck with the hypodermic needle and jumped against the glass separating the ex-president from the laboratory and the virus. The monkey infected the ex-president and he became the first casualty of his own biological warfare weapon.

My son was savvy enough to leave the ex-president unnamed, although his reference to his number in the presidential succession made it clear that he had fictitiously killed off President X. I will not name him but leave it to your imagination instead.

So that’s the kind of thing we get into as we probe around in 50 to 60 years of things that seemed too important to throw away yet not important enough to look at again for all those years. Today we are going through it all and judiciously deciding what parts of the memorabilia should be kept for another half century or so.

A small stack of photos and letters has come inside the house again. Approximately eight sizable boxes of refuse sit on the curb waiting for the City of Lake Jackson Sanitation Department to make the rounds and squeeze it all into the back of a truck to take off the the city dump.

Lost forever is my master’s thesis bibliographic card file that would tell you all you could ever wish to know about American political parties, circa 1964. How quaint was the state of political partisanship then.