Who gets to eat out?

I don’t especially want to have dinner with Sarah Huckabee Sanders. You know, be at the same table in a restaurant. She strongly supports political policies with which I disagree. Her ejection from a restaurant in Virginia last weekend, however, is way beyond acceptable norms of behavior. Is her ejection a barometer of the wave of populism that is changing American culture?

Mrs. Sanders is the Press Secretary for the Trump administration. We see her on television almost daily, reporting on the events at the White House, explaining the president’s policies and sometimes trying to explain the president himself or his tweets. It’s a difficult job that requires her to varnish the truth from time to time. Everyone knows it and goes along with the game. It’s too bad that press secretaries have to do that. She directs most of her pronouncements at the 30 percent of the population that form the Trump base of voters. I disagree with most of the things that energize them. But, that’s not the point!

Mrs. Sanders, accompanied by her husband and friends went to a small restaurant for dinner last weekend. The Red Hen has about 12 tables. When the wait-staff noticed that Mrs. Sanders was in the room, they, totally flummoxed, called the owner at home, to see what they should do about it. The owner came to her restaurant, asked Mrs. Sanders to go to the patio where they could talk privately. She asked Mrs. Sanders to leave. The restaurant owner did not want to serve anyone who worked for Trump. The rest of the dinner party left with her. The firestorm on social media was quick and ferocious, with about equal numbers of supporters and detractors.

Mrs. Sanders should not have been asked to leave. We must ask ourselves what has become of our country. Politics, always a blood sport, operated within certain rules of behavior. It is not acceptable to refuse service to someone because of who employs them. Disagree with their politics all you want, but they have the right to go out to dinner, expect a degree of privacy and expect good service. Regrettably, the owner of the restaurant did not extend that courtesy to Mrs. Sanders, and we, as a nation, are the worse for it.

The political divide in the country is severe; people no longer understand the idea of freedom of speech, expression, religion, or politics. Our values demand that we respect other people’s opinions, politics, or religion. Our ethos tells us not to discriminate against people for who they are, what they believe, or whom they worship. Yet, the nation is split down the middle on these core values.  People won’t invite members of the opposite party into their homes, associate with them socially, or eat dinner in a restaurant with them.

We have seen balkanization too often in our history and the rest of the world. It never turns out ok. It leads to populism, and that never turns out ok. The issues that divide the nation are so great that few have real ideas for fixing them. We might start by letting families go to the restaurant of their choice. We might start by trying to be nicer to our fellow citizens. We might start by being more polite to those with whom we disagree politically. We might try staying calm.

Will Durant summarized one of Aristotle’s famous works this way: “we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act but a habit.” Isn’t it time for us to be, repeatedly, a tolerant people, not a divisive people, to be a people willing, repeatedly, to consider other points of view, to be a people repeatedly willing to let even our political opposites enjoy an evening meal with friends?  

What will you tell your grandchildren and great-grandchildren?

We are a nation of immigrants, yet too many of us are anti-immigration. Once our ancestors settled in and the third generation became the norm, many of us discourage others from coming.

People immigrated to the US because of intolerable situations in their homelands: religious persecutions in England, famine in Ireland, the extermination of Jews in Germany, oppression in Russia, civil unrest in Central America, lack of living wages in Mexico, or killing rampages after the Vietnam War. Hundreds of thousands of people came through Ellis Island in the East, and Angel Island in the West. They came for a better life for their families or simple survival. My ancestors came from France, Ireland, and Hungary.

Once here, all was never as expected. Those who were already here feared the loss of jobs, they feared possible changes in norms and culture, and they feared fear itself. Irish-need-not –apply signs were prominently placed on factory walls and store windows. The KKK burned crosses on church lawns. Racial segregation was enforced. National and ethnic segregation was the norm in much of the country. We beckoned people to come and then treated them in unwelcoming ways.

The nation’s immigration policies of the last three or four decades resulted in millions of people coming into the country illegally. Some, in fact many, have lived in the US for over ten years; they got jobs, bought homes, educated their kids in public schools, and sent them to college. The parents are illegal but most of the kids are citizens or dream of citizenship in the only country they know.

Our history has its warts, to be sure. From the early days, starting with Jefferson, our national belief in Manifest Destiny was our excuse for taking over large swaths of the continent, starting with the Louisiana Purchase, going to war with Mexico to gain control of California and the Southwest, and attempts to annex large parts of the Oregon Territory claimed by the English. President Polk, in 1844, ran on a ticket of “54/40 or fight.” Our history is replete with government actions to displace people from their lands. We cannot be proud of how we treated Native Americans, many religious groups, and minorities in general. We have had several periods in our history when immigration was discouraged when immigrants were abused, and when we treated people badly. Today we are witnessing a new level of disdain with which we are not comfortable.

Our current government administration is enforcing a zero tolerance level of immigration that we have not seen in modern times. They do it arbitrarily and without compassion. Our government does not distinguish between refugees seeking asylum and those just crossing the border for personal advantage. All are treated as criminals. Instead of caring for families until their cases are adjudicated, children are yanked from their parents and then sent to detention facilities. Thousands of children, even babies who were breastfeeding, are sent to warehouse facilities run by Homeland Security. Even in our dark days when we sent Japanese citizens to internment camps in WWII, we did not separate children from their parents.

News organizations publish pictures of thousands of children incarcerated in chain-link fence cages, pictures of others sent to the heat of Arizona to live in tents, pictures of kids living on energy bars, and pictures of toddlers bewildered by their situation. We see pictures of small children in diapers in those cages with other children too young to care for them. Even with all the published pictures and the anecdotal stories that grow every day, the Director of Homeland Security denies the existence of a policy of family separation. The president says it’s a law created by the opposition party, denies the Department of Justice’s policy of zero tolerance; both are lies.

Is this the nation we want to be? Is this the nation we have become? The outrage is growing. People of principle are outraged. Religious leaders of all faiths are outraged. Former First Ladies are outraged. The general population is outraged. The United Nations Human Rights Council has decried our outrageous policies as inhumane.

Newspaper articles tell riveting stories of mothers deported without their children, of parents arrested while mowing the lawn in front of their homes, of children sent back to countries they do not know or to which they no longer have any connections.

Countries have a right and a duty to protect their borders, but they must do it humanely. Our country and its leadership, the executive branch and the legislative branch are shameful in their pursuit of these family-separation policies. It is time to stop this inhumane treatment of people. It is time to raise the cry for change. It may be a time to take to the streets in protest. We are sickened by the behavior of our government, and by the election fears of Congress who are complicit in these inhuman actions.

What will we tell our grandchildren and great-grandchildren that we did while our country tore children from their mothers and put them in concentration camps?

Startling Primary Results

California will have a Democrat and a Republican running for Governor in the general election in November. Can you believe that? What is the big deal, you ask?

If you do not live in California, you may not understand our surprise. Pundits and talking heads had predicted we would have two Democrats running against each other in the race for Governor. Remember, this is California. We do things a little differently.

In our primaries, all candidates for each office are on the same ballot, regardless of party affiliation. Correct! There isn’t a separate ballot for Republican candidates and another ballot for Democratic candidates. All the candidates are on the same ballot. The top two winners go at each other in November, regardless of party. Go figure.

The race for governor will feature Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, and John Cox, a Republican. The race for Lieutenant Governor will be between two Democrats. In the race for US Senator, Feinstein, an 84-year-old Democrat garnered 1.7 million votes, and Kevin De Leon, a 51-year-old Democrat received 441 thousand votes. All the Republicans running for the Senate seat received fewer votes so they won’t be on the ballot in November. (Shades of Reagan’s debate with Mondale: “I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's youth and inexperience.") The six Republican Candidates split 1.1 million votes. One wonders if the results would be different if the GOP had united behind one candidate.

There are 53 congressional districts in the state, most represented by Democrats. An independent commission was established a number of years ago to design the congressional districts. It reduces the influence of one party over the other and avoids the gerrymandering that results when the legislatures design the districts. They do a pretty good job. Democrats polled well in most of the heavy Republican congressional districts. Republicans did well enough to get on the ballot in most heavy Democratic districts. This resulted in candidates from two parties in most district elections in November. Go figure.

Several counties in California use a vote-by-mail only system for this primary. Sacramento County, as an example, is reporting a 40% voter turnout, a historic high for a mid-term election in the last few decades. If these numbers hold, it bodes well for the turnout in the 2020 elections when the whole state will vote by mail.

I like the new vote-by-mail system and I like the top-two system for primaries. I do not know, yet, if either is better than the old systems, but they are more convenient and will change campaign dynamics in the years to come.

If most people are voting by mail, the campaign is really over a few weeks before Election Day. If that discourages candidates from mailing tons of printed material or reduces the number of TV ads, that would really be plus for the trees and us.

The Vote-By-Mail Primary

Tomorrow, June 5, 2018, is the last day to submit a ballot for the California primaries. I voted on May 15, 2018. I filled in the circles on the ballots, I inserted the ballots into pink envelopes, I sealed the envelopes, and then I signed the envelopes. I dropped it off at City Hall on May 16, 2018. Done!

I haven’t voted at a polling place in years, but this time was different. Every registered voter in our county, about 740,000 of us, received their ballots in the mail last month. We will all vote by mail in future elections as well. This may seem strange to folks in some states that seem to limit voter registration and voting itself.

The governor signed a bill in 2016 that allows 14 counties to hold mail-only elections in 2018. The rest of the counties will follow in 2020. It makes sense. By 2016, over 51% of voters in California voted by mail anyway. Conducting elections is expensive. It requires large staffs at each of the hundreds of voter precincts in each county. Vote-by-mail only requires 53 drop-off points in Sacramento County. If one feels the need, a few voting centers opened for a few days ago, where one can actually vote in person.

We used to stand in line to vote. The clerk checked off our names, verified our address, and we signed our name next to our printed name in the Registrar’s book. Then we went to a booth to fill out the ballot. We put the completed ballot in a locked box with the slit in the top. We stood in line, we did our civic duty, and we felt good about it.  

I remember voting on a large mechanical voting machine a few times that let you push one lever to cast all your votes for one party. They called it voting the party line. Does the party mean all that much anymore? The local paper just reported that there are more people in California registered as no party preference than there are registered Republicans. The county estimates that the vote-by-mail system will save about four million dollars for this primary alone, about nine dollars per registered voter. The whole idea is to make voting easier, make it more convenient, and to encourage more people to vote. We have come a long way.

When I cast my first vote, I was required to have paid my poll tax, a levy on every citizen of the state who was over 21 years old. I think it was $10 or $12, but still … In the South, the poll tax was a way to keep non-whites from voting.  The courts ruled it unconstitutional a couple of years later. 

Voting is still a state function. If you are an 18-year-old US citizen, you should be able to register to vote with no barriers to the process. If you have an address in the county and state in which you want to vote, you should be able to register to vote with no barriers. If you are a registered voter and have a government-issued photo ID, you should be able to vote with no barriers. Proclamations that requiring a government photo ID to register to vote, or to actually vote, is a deterrent to actually registering or voting is pure tommyrot.

The least we should require at the voting station is an ID to match the registration. Some say the poor cannot afford an ID. If they don’t have an ID, they can’t sign up for Social Security benefits, food stamps, they can't drive or open a bank account; why not to vote. Getting an acceptable ID is pretty easy and cheap and in many states, free.

Registering to vote should be easy. In our state and some others, you are automatically registered to vote when you apply for a driver’s license or state ID, (you can decline if you want) or you can register online. In fact, in California, you can register in any of ten languages.[i] People in many parts of the country may find that odd, but in Florida, you can register in Creole.[ii] In California, about 800,000 people speak Tagalog as a first language at home, more than the population of some states. Nearly 100,000 people speak Khmer at home. In some parts of the state, over 70% of the people speak Spanish. In LA there are 244 recognized languages used on the streets every day. I’m a bit torn about this. I think people should vote in English.

To become a US citizen, a person must sit through an interview and take a civics test in English, unless they have been in the country for a long time and are over 55 years of age. I don’t think 55 years old is very old, anymore! Generally, registration forms and ballots are printed in English in most states.

I find it a bit disconcerting that in California, the home of modern technology, we can’t vote on our phones, tablets, or computers. Then again, the Russians might like that. Just maybe a vote-by-mail paper ballot, in a sealed pink envelope, is the way to go.

I like the vote-by-mail system. You can read about the candidate’s biography if he or she paid to have it included. You don’t need a “sample ballot” to take into the voting booth with you because you can’t remember for whom you wanted to vote. You can discuss proposition pros and cons before you vote. Mostly I like it because it is easy, it lets me vote when I want to and Mr. Putin will never know which circle I filled in.

Tomorrow we will know who won the primaries, and that’s another story!

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[i] English, Spanish, Chinese, Hindi, Japanese, Khmer, Korean, Tagalog, Thai, and Vietnamese,

[ii] Miamidadecounty.gov