As of the date of this writing there are two weeks, just two tiny weeks, before we determine what kind of country we'll have going forward. I saw one opinion that stated that the election in two weeks is the most important election in our nation's history. I thought about that for a minute and it came to me that the election of 1860 was pretty impactful, but I get the point of the opinion.
This election will determine the direction of our national government and will set the stage for the presidential election in 2024. So it's important that each of us casts our vote and make our voices heard.
In other words, let's exercise democratic principles and processes while we still can. If you're like me and can vote early, then do it! NOW!
Hyperbole? I don't think so. There are people who are running for public office, and those who support and fund them, who want to demolish democracy and replace it with ...? That's anyone's guess but you can bet that the replacement won't be good.
Candidates who promote the Big Lie of the 2020 election are feverishly working to promote that same lie in 2022 - if they win the election was fair, if they lose the election was rigged. Look for that lie to be asserted in Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and no doubt elsewhere.
Of course, the basis of that lie is pure Q'anon bullpucky. After the 2020 presidential election, Georgia conducted three separate election audits, one painstakingly hand counting each ballot cast, and the result did not change.
In Arizona, the losing party engaged a firm named CyberNinjas to conduct an exhaustive audit. And exhausting, err exhaustive, it was. Months were spent pouring through records and the examination of individual paper ballots. They examined tabulation processes and the composition of the paper ballots to see whether there were any traces of bamboo in the paper. And they did find that some votes were miscounted - with the result that the winner of that state's electoral votes won Arizona by a larger vote total than originally reported.
Not quite the result that the losers of that election wanted. I doubt CyberMonkeys, I mean CyberNinjas will receive any repeat business from Arizona.
But you can't keep determined authoritarians down. Three election deniers are running in Arizona for governor, U.S. senator, and the state's secretary of state. Early voting has begun in that state, and people are encouraged to cast their ballots in various drop boxes located around the state. However, as a recent report shows, armed men in bulletproof vests are accosting voters with the single purpose of intimidating those voters. If I recall, intimidation of voters to cause them not to vote is a federal offense.
If any of the aforementioned candidates loses (hope springs eternal), they will challenge the veracity of the results. Even if the three win and take office, they will still work to change the elections systems in that state, by purging the voter rolls and closely regulating and limiting the periods people can vote, all in the name of reform.
I'm old enough to remember when "reform" was a good thing.
I highlight Arizona not just because it's easy and they deserve it, but to show in stark relief what's at stake in this country in 2022. Obviously it's not just Arizona, it's also Georgia where over the years hundreds of thousands of voters (many persons of color) have been purged from the voter rolls. Hell, they even outlawed people from giving water to voters standing in long lines awaiting their turn to cast their ballots. In other words, you can get arrested in Georgia for being a good humane guy.
Florida is an avatar of our possible authoritarian future. The Ivy League educated governor has strong-armed the legislature to enact legislation mandating what must be taught in public schools, and more importantly what must be excluded. So, the history of the Civil War is couched in economic issues rather than slavery. A "don't say gay" bill was enacted prohibiting the use of the word "gay", or even any mention of or reference to same sex marriage in any school curricula.
I guess they don't teach Loving v. Virginia at Harvard Law. Or maybe the governor didn't attend class the day they taught law at the law school.
If there's any reason to vote that governor out of office in two weeks, it's the stunt he pulled by using tax payer dollars to hire a plane, send an operative to Texas to essentially cajole 20+ Venezuelan immigrants to get on the plane and fly them to Martha's Vineyard. No doubt he expected outrage and confusion on the Vineyard. Instead what he saw was compassion and humanity by the residents of the Vineyard and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
In this instance, did he own the libs or did the libs own him? Either way, he picked his victims well. If he went to Miami and put 20+ random Cuban immigrants on that plane there'd be a different reaction from his constituents. What they evidently don't understand is that next time (and there will no doubt be a next time of, if not this stunt, a stunt equally onerous) it could be their people, stripped away from their communities, and sent to unknown locations.
I won't even get into the buses transporting and depositing immigrants, without warning or coordination, into our major cities throughout the country. Unceremoniously dropped off, no coordination with local authorities, only to be treated like chattel. And the governors of Florida and Texas cheer their inhumanity shown to those most vulnerable of people.
This is just the tip of the governmental iceberg nightmare we may confront beginning in 2023. Aside from these examples, we've seen the liberty rights of one-half of our population stripped away without hesitation. The author of that odious judgment in 2005 told Massachusetts senator Edward Kennedy that the Roe decision highlighted the liberty rights enshrined in our Constitution. By the summer of 2022, that author basically asked, "what liberty rights?"
Who put that justice on the Supreme Court? Elected officials, who once stood for office seeking and receiving our votes. Elections matter.
There are a lot of things that need to be addressed by the government in the coming years. Economic issues of jobs and inflation are at the top of the list of concerns voters have. Inflation is seemingly out of control. But bear in mind that the issues created during the pandemic with jobs shut down and supply-chains disrupted, contributed to shortages. The predictable outcome was that when the economy ramped up, people with money bought those goods in short supply, thus driving prices up.
There is nothing untypical about what's happening, it's basic market forces at work in a capitalist system. Oh, and there's the illegal and unsupportable actions of Mad Vlad in the Ukraine that, along with the recent OPEC limitations of barrel output, will cause the price at the gas pump to increase.
There's nothing unusual about this economic condition we find ourselves in. Even if we do nothing, this is likely to begin to pass during the first half of 2023. However, that will create many foreseeable challenges. Who has policies to deal with those challenges? How uses the blame game to obscure the fact that they have no policies?
Who has articulated the diminution of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid programs? Who has decided that the Social Contract signed between the people and their government is no longer worth upholding?
Who demagogues and racializes crime in our communities? Who sows fear in an effort to get votes?
Who so disdains democracy that they would reduce, or suspend altogether, the support that we give to the people in the Ukraine who fight and die on a daily basis for the right to secure the type of government and society they want? And it is beyond contestation that they fight for democracies everywhere.
And who will fail to address the economic structures that evolved over more than forty years that has produced a level of income and wealth inequalities in American history? Wages for the middle class held to about three percent while those of the upper one percent of earners increased by over 200 percent? How has that impacted the distribution and creation of generational wealth?
The middle class allowed itself to be anesthetized to this trend by the availability of easy credit so that the consumer economy could hum along without disruption, creating and contributing to the already extant inequalities.
Oh, and the earth is warming so there's that. However, in the face of overwhelming evidence there are those who deny science. Many are running for office.
I could go on but I think I made my point. There's a lot at stake, our futures and perhaps our lives.
Elections are about the future, not the past. We will never go back to live a past that never really existed. We cannot forget about the promise of this country and forbid the welcoming of the "other" into our communities. We all come from "others" who contributed their lives so that we can live ours.
The question is simple - do we ignore the sacrifice of our ancestors and vote for lies and a fictional history of America? Or do we work to expand democracy here at home and abroad, work for a fairer more humane society, and work for those with vision for the future that comports with the best vision of our founders?
We still have a choice. It is ours whether to save or destroy democracy. Choose wisely and VOTE!
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