Can We Last?

We are in an age of accelerations![i] Things are moving so fast that we can’t keep up with them, learn to accommodate them, or figure out what to do with them. Rapid change bounces off the sideboards like a missed slap shot waiting for someone to send it into the net, to make something of it. The last fifteen years have seen more change and the fastest change since Gutenberg designed his quick printer. Technology changes faster than we do.

Change is the wild card in any age or era; some move at the pace of a large glacier while others move like burbling Class VI rapids. Good thinkers, good chroniclers of our age, and muses alike are falling over each other trying to explain what is happening to us in the present.

A quick glance espies the trends created by full speed change: our politics is askew,  grasping power more important than governing, educational systems designed for an agrarian society, those who should unite us divide us, we distrust of those with whom we disagree and anyone who isn’t like us; and that’s just for starters.

 People traditionally lived where they were born. Even today, 11 percent of Americans have never left the state of their birth, 54% have never been in more than 10 States and 40% have never left the country.[ii] How can people have a national view or world view if they have experienced neither? 

Modern technology is changing the very nature of work and jobs. Incentives to move to urban areas, particularly on the coasts, where the new job companies are searching for applicants grows daily. This leaves the middle of the country and small population segments with little to offer in the way of economic security. Those lacking high-level skills won’t find opportunities to propel themselves to the middle-class. The low-skill jobs that provided middle-class lifestyles diminish in front of our eyes. The slow pace of change of the past isn’t prologue for this new era.

Population shifts upend political systems. Equal representation is altered if not diminished and power struggles for control rise to new levels. LA County, for example, is larger in square miles than the states of Rhode Island and Delaware combined. Its population is larger than all but ten states. The US Senate is evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, yet the Democrats represent 43.5 million more people than the Republican senators.[iii]

I’m OK with each state getting two senators, but it means that if either party wants to control the national agenda it must win at the state level. Democrats aren’t good at doing that. The Republicans hold trifectas in 21 states: they control the governorship, the statehouse, and the state senate. They determine the design of the voting districts, they control who goes to Congress. They pick the voters versus the other way around.

Population shift alters the way we see and feel about others. David Brooks reminds us that the categories we create to help us make sense of things, essentialism, can become a belief that people really are the way we think about them, that the boundaries between groups are clear and hard. He would tell you “America is awash in essentialism.”[iv] It’s a myth to think that there is more that unites us than divides us. Maybe once!

A recent University of Virginia Center for Politics poll a country so divided that we can, without hyperbole, question how long we will be the united states that people fought and died for.[v] The poll questioned thousands of people who voted in the 2020 election, about half and half Trump or Biden voters. The results are worth listing, considering, and worrying about. These are the stark reality of today’s America.

·       80% of Biden and Trump voters agree that elected officials of the other party “present a clear and present danger to American democracy.”

·       70% of both sets of voters believe some extreme media voices on the other side should be censored

·       More than 78% of Biden and Trump voters believe that Americans who strongly support the opposite party also threaten the American way of life

·       60% of Biden and about 80% of Trump voters believe things like “true citizens” should help “eliminate the evil that poisons our country from within.”

·       About 45% of both groups say the country would be better off if the president could take needed action without the constraints of Congress and the courts

These aren’t American values, but these divisions hit us daily in newspapers, on paper, on-air, streaming, or on social media. Congress can’t even agree to pay its bills. People uneducated in the immunology sciences feel embolden to eschew proven public health practices and ignore the science for minimizing and gaining control over a monster killing virus. People gang up on school boards and city leaders demanding the overthrow of mask mandates because it infringes on their “rights,” to do what they want and to hell with the effects on people around them. Their distrust levels are so high that they have forgotten how to behave as a united people.

Facts no longer matter. Emotion has a stronger hold. Too many, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, hold to a belief that the 2020 election was fraudulent. State legislative bodies fund incompetent fly-by-night organizations to find nonexistent stolen ballots, pass laws that will give them the power to override voter choices, oust election officials with whom they disagree, all of which reduces trust in election outcomes. It is a wave passing over the country, happening now. It is not the American ethos.

It isn’t just one party doing harm to the nation. When voters think we need censorship, institutional trust has waned. When voters think the president should not be constrained by other branches of government the ideals of the Founders have slipped and Nationalism has taken root.

The ideals of a participative democracy require discussions about policy, compromise on policy, and implementing what is best for the nation, not the party. Democracy requires trust that the other’s ideas are an alternative to one’s own, not an attempt to take down the country. Opposing views and loyal opposition are the essences of a democratic republic. A winner-take-all view doesn’t meet the ideals of the Founders.

The speed of change in all facets of our lives engenders fear, scapegoating, a me-first view of the nation and the world. People who don’t have the new-job skills feel left out, those who can’t move to areas of high employment feel abandoned, people who don’t see a better life for their children despair. Then they all cling to any intoxicating personality who promises to make their lives better, who challenges revered institutions, and who blames the rest of the world for their woe. Facts don’t matter much when life isn’t delivering the promise.

Our inability to keep up with the sea change washing over us in too many areas raises questions about the long-held beliefs about our country and ourselves. It changes our behavior as well.

We have seen change before and we have weathered it. But this seems different. This is a time when the very notion of our democratic republic is in question and at stake. Can we reclaim our commitment to being a united people, to be our brother’s keeper, to the idea that the people rule and not the government? Can we survive as a free country and not go into the abyss like so many others who gave up their democracy?

What must we change to be once more that shining city on the hill?

 

                            

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[i] Thank You For Being Late – Thomas L Friedman – Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York,2016

[ii] Lea Lane – Forbes – May 2, 2019

[iii] Ian Millhiser – Vox – 11/20/2020

[iv] David Brooks – Here’s the Mind-set That’s Tearing Us Apart – New York Times – October 7, 2021

[v] Tim Robinson – UVA Today – September 30, 2021

Where is our steel?

 “May you live in interesting times” is a familiar Chinese curse. I’m not sure who put the hex on us, but it seems to be working, and not in a good way.

On 9/11/2001 President Bush addressed a stunned nation: “Terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America. These acts shatter steel, but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve.” Twenty years later we see a nation’s resolve bent and twisted, most divided since the Civil War and political power struggles threaten our very democracy. Interesting is not the same as good.

Interesting, isn’t it that in a perverse way armed insurrectionists can attack the nation’s capitol and then be described as typical vacationing tourists? It is interesting that members of Congress at the highest levels of leadership threaten companies and organizations that comply with Congressional Committee demands for evidence about the insurrection.

It is interesting that nearly half of the House and Senate opposed the formation of a committee to investigate the seditious acts of January 6^th. Only in interesting times would partisan political leaders consider staging a demonstration at the capitol in support of those who tried to take America down. The hex is working!

Nobody can rationally believe that the 2020 election was stolen, was rigged, or the result of technological tampering from dead dictators from South America. And yet members of state legislatures are enacting voter suppression laws that they hope will discourage people from voting in future elections. Across the country, other states are planning to copycat the new suppression laws of Texas. Rather than encouraging people to vote, they want the opposite. The hex is working!

The nation spent a year and a half trying to quell the spread of a vicious virus that infected millions of people and killed over 600,000 people. The virus mutated into the Delta variant, then the Lambda variant, and now to the Mu variant. New covid cases are again at all-time highs, hospital ICUs are at capacity, school children are being infected by the hundreds of thousands, and a large swath of the population chooses to ignore proven public health practices and enact laws that forbid those practices. The hex is working!

State leaders, thirsty for power, drink from the fountain of lies and extremism flowing from ultra-right-wing cable programs and out-or-control social media.  They forbid schools from demanding that students wear masks in the classroom, that adults be required to mask up in stores and restaurants, or even discourage people from getting vaccinated against the virus. These people, mostly state governors, are willing to play roulette with the lives of school children, too young to be vaccinated, in order to satiate their political base.

Governors do these dastardly acts knowing full well that the majority of Americans do not support their demagoguery. They know that we could have beaten this virus if people had been encouraged to mask up, social distance and get the vaccines when they became available. But they listened, instead, to the talking heads on cable news that spewed false information across the airways and the internet. The hex is working!

Over fifty percent of Americans are in favor of vaccine mandates and mask mandates, but if you look at the answers to the surveys it is apparent that one’s viewpoint is very much along political party lines; about 80% of Democrat-leaning folks favor the mandates and about 70+% of Republican-leaning folks are against them. And that is the problem, isn’t it? Healthcare is now political.

So it is fair to ask if we are any longer one nation. In 2001 the nation held hands and joined the fight against foreign terrorists. Today the homegrown terrorists seem to want to bring the country to its knees. A functioning nation would have arrested the people who invaded the capitol on the spot. A functioning nation would have governors that joined arms and proclaimed a call for using well-tested public health strategies to combat the covid-19 Alpha strain. A functioning nation would have a Congress that united to overcome the threat of internal terrorist activities rather than laud those who tried to thwart the will of the people.

A united nation would be aghast at state attempts to suppress the very thing that distinguishes us from despotic countries, every adult citizen’s right to vote easily. At what point are we no longer a nation with common beliefs and core values? When do we say that voting, so fundamental to whom we are, that those who oppose it should be replaced?

We know two things for sure: when a person or group of people, or a party, wants to take over a country for themselves, they first attack the press, suppress voting in free elections and take over the school curriculum. Too many, in the name of increased freedom, are doing everything in their power to decrease our freedom.

 We live in interesting times, times of opportunity, and danger. We can take the opportunity to bring the country together, make us a united nation, or we can simply watch the activities that divide us tear us further apart and live with the danger of losing our democratic republic. Where is the steel of our American resolve to be a free people? Why have we let extremist ideology shake the foundations of our nation?

 

 

 

It's hard to keep up!

 A couple of weeks ago I started to write some thoughts about the new surge of covid racing across the country. The opening paragraph was good enough so that some might read further. That done, I realized it was already old news. I started again, and then again. This scourge is moving too fast. It’s hard to get a firm grip on its reality. It’s hard to keep up!

We thought we had it licked a couple of months ago, didn't we? We were on track to vaccinate enough people to be close to herd immunity, and then we weren’t. The virus and its mutations are doing what viruses do. The problem is that not enough people are doing what people are supposed to do to beat the virus at its own tricks.

The fault, dear people, is not in our stars, but in ourselves…[i] A little over 70% of our citizens are partially vaccinated, which months ago we thought would be sufficient, we now need about 90% now. Why? Because of the large numbers of Americans who are not willing to take a little effort needed to help the country overcome this pandemic. Some state governors are making crazy political decisions rather than healthcare decisions. We know that masks reduce the spread of the virus to others, or get it ourselves. We know that the more unvaccinated people congregate with others who are unvaccinated, the more the virus spreads and the more the virus mutates. And yet, the governors are telling their people that there will be no mask mandates or vaccine mandates.

For some reason, the idea of wearing a mask to fight a virus pandemic is now an affront to one’s freedom. Somehow, the idea of getting vaccinated is considered an affront to our ability to make a choice of whether or not we should help stop the spread. It is about as un-American as one can get. Some people can be exempted from vaccination for legitimate medical reasons, and there are some with religious reasons for not getting immunized, but they are few and far between.

Maybe the blame is in our stars. Too many TV and radio talk show star commentators are spreading bad information, raising doubts about the efficacy, and making healthcare a political issue.

The slanted news opinions and the numbers don’t often match. But, just for the hey of it, let’s look at one set of facts. Let’s compare now to a year ago.

Cases	May 15, 2020	May 15, 2021	August 9, 2021
7 day moving Average	23,000	29,000	235,000
Deaths	1446	604	552

Today, twenty states report over 200 deaths per 100,000 population because of the virus, NY at 276, Massachusetts at  263, while Hawaii has only 38, and Vermont only 42 deaths per 100K. The Delta variant is responsible for 87% of the new deaths. One of the first steps to solving a problem is to ask what changed or what is different. Most of the states reporting high death rates from the virus have low vaccination rates or forbid mask mandates. Duh! Vermont for example was quick to urge people to stay home if they could, to wear a mask out of the home, and to wash hands frequently. It was also quick to shut down restaurants and stores. The people followed the directions well. Institutional programs worked well and hospital censuses remained low.

The lack of positive leadership by some state governors isn’t the only reason for the new surge, but they play a significant role in a disappointing response to a national emergency. You would think that using a vaccine to fight a virus is something new. Schools in Florida require immunization for at least seven different diseases. Texas requires immunization for seven different diseases. Mississippi requires vaccination for at least seven diseases. And yet, political leaders are mandating that there be no public health measures to quell a raging pandemic. In the meantime pediatric ICUs are full, hospitals can’t take on new emergency patients and we expose kids exposed to a virus that can kill them. We don’t have polio because we vaccinate against it. We don’t have measles because we vaccinate against it. We don’t have diphtheria because we vaccinate against it. And yet, for god knows what reason, we have mothers and fathers in the streets protesting against a vaccine that could save their child’s life. It’s hard to keep up.

 I went to a busy grocery store last week. All the customers wore masks. All the clerks and other workers wore masks. Except for younger children, most people in our area are fully vaccinated.

People got in the habit of wearing masks during the last year and a half and continue to do so out of an abundance of caution. Now that the Delta variant is wreaking havoc across the state and the nation, we are under a mandate to wear a mask when we are out and about. I haven’t heard one person say that it is an infringement on their freedom or that wearing a mask is a way for the government to control us. But hey, I know we live on the left coast. In California, all teachers must be vaccinated or suffer through constant testing. Anyone who has had a seven-foot Qtip pushed up his or her nose knows that the vaccine shot is easier. Well, it felt like seven feet!

Have we become a nation wherein each person considers his or her opinion as valid as the next person’s? That has never been true. The notion that you or I can read about two pieces of scientific data and come to our own conclusion about which is best for us or our family is ludicrous. I may be able to come to better conclusions about my area of expertise, but not about another’s area of expertise. My years-old penchant for history doesn’t make me an expert epidemiologist? So why don’t we listen to the experts? Dr. Fauci has led the NIAID for 37 years, the agency that deals with allergies and infectious diseases like AIDS, Ebola, and other illnesses. For whatever reason, I value his views on covid more than yours or mine.

The data changes every day so science changes every day. TV stars cast doubt on the efforts to curb the virus. Schools in some states mandate masks others forbid them. Some states are opening slowly while others are wide open. Some states can brag about being well vaccinated while others are proud that they aren’t. In some states, hospitals are at capacity, at a state-wide breakdown point and the governor says not to get excited, everything is OK.

 It’s hard to keep up!

 

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[i] With thanks to the Bard, Julius Caesar, Act 1, scene 2

52 Years Ago Tomorrow!

 We bought our first color television set on July 18, 1969. It was the first one in the extended family. We could watch the moon landing in color. Wow! On July 20, 1969, parents, aunts and uncles, cousins and assorted friends gathered in our tiny living room to watch, in color, Americans land on the moon. We saw the giant leap for mankind. We saw two men walk on the moon. It was amazing! It was, for some, unbelievable. It was broadcast in black and white.

 

We, the United States had won the real race for space, the one started by the Soviet Union when it launched Sputnik in 1957. We put ten more men on the moon in the years that followed; the last one was in 1972. The whole adventure was a technological series of events that mesmerized the world. Then it became routine enough so that people were too busy to watch a landing on the moon. We bore quickly.

 

A couple of weeks ago, a multi-billionaire, Richard Branson rode a plane to the edge of space, some 50 plus miles above earth’s surface. A bunch of civilians earned their astronaut wings in a commercial venture.

 

Tomorrow another multi-billionaire, Jeff Bezos, of Amazon fame, and other passengers will venture to 62 miles above the earth’s surface; above the Karman Line, the real edge of space. Both billionaires see space as a cash cow. Virgin wants to send up flights every few weeks at a quarter of a million dollars per seat. Bezos wants to send people to Mars and back.

 

Where is NASA? The government space administration is still doing science, I guess. We can give them that. They created, launched, and supported an international space station, but they no longer have a spacecraft capable of reaching it. They relied on Russian rockets for a few years and now rely on multi-billionaires commercial rockets to get them to the space station.

 

Years ago, when flying was still an adventure, and only for the better well to do, the Sunday drive often included a stop at the end of the runway at Lambert Field, St. Louis, to watch planes land and take off. When TWA bought its first 747 it parked it near one of the closer gates and allowed visitors to tour the plane. They might never fly in a “jumbo jet,” but at least they had seen one up close. Flying was exciting back then.

 

NASA hasn’t given the public an exciting event in years. Scientists get excited about the pictures from Mars, of galaxies far away, of black holes forming and eating up small stars, and slogging through other faraway phenomena. It is all good learning, for sure. But how does it help Jane and Joe Six-Pack? Where is the excitement?

 

When Apollo went to the moon, the onboard processor ran at 0.043 MHz. That means that the phone in our pocket is 100,000 times more powerful. The Chinese landed a module on the backside of the moon that is studying the universe from that angle and searching for ways to control satellites from there. They have a rover on Mars broadcasting data that will help them land people, up there before we do. Will we relive the panic that overcame America when the USSR put Sputnik into orbit in 1957?

 

Where is NASA? Where is the American spirit that drove us to previous greatness that created excitement for the world? We were united then. We had an overarching belief that we could do anything we wanted, and quicker than anyone else? Where is that belief today?

 

Where is our belief in the scientific process? Even basic science has gone political. Huge numbers of people still believe that covid-19 was and is a hoax. Nearly half the population believes the vaccines are fake science, that they contain materials, at the request of the government, that magnetize us, that change our DNA, that has miniature chips that allow the government to track us and force us to do evil. Over 600,000 Americans have died because of covid and still too many don’t believe the news. In those areas of the country where vaccination rates are low, the virus is spreading like wildfire. But people still resist the vaccine which they consider a liberal effort to control the people. If we can’t believe in a process as simple as a vaccine protecting us from a virus, how will we believe that science can take us to the limits of space?

 

Let’s not put all of the blame on NASA, but they are part of the problem. They owe us some scientific excitement! Why only shoot for Mars? Let’s put the smartphone to good use!

The 4th!

 

The American President, a mid-1990s movie, had a short scene in which a politico from a university with a top-notch football team asked the President to do something about how Title IX was being implemented. When reminded that the law was an effort to eliminate discrimination in women’s sports, he complained that while he knew about the law, he was upset because the government was trying to enforce it.

 

Around July 4^th each year is a time for scholars, news reporters, and pundits to tell us what they think Independence Day is all about. This year some told us that a once historical unifying institution now seems like empty rhetoric to too many, people of different races, different cultures, and surprisingly, wait for it, different political parties.

 

The land on which the US sits has been here for over four billion years, but the nation we call the US, is relatively new. The first established town was St. Augustine, in 1585, Jamestown began in 1607 and Plymouth in 1620. It took another 150 years for the colonies to declare their independence from Britain, and they did it with fervor. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” We are, after 245 years, still a work in progress.

 

Another eleven years passed before “We the People …” formed an effective government. History always has two versions, one written by the winners, and the other by the vanquished. Depending on where you lived, you may have studied the history of the Civil War or the history of Northern Aggression. White people, consciously or unconsciously, wrote Elementary and high school history texts, for white people and they were used as a tool for indoctrinating patriotism. Civic classes taught about the great ideas in the Declaration and the Constitution without paying too much attention to how many of them owned slaves, how they counted Blacks in the census, or who could vote.

 

Those history books may not have mentioned the Japanese internment camps, or highlight the anti-American hatred of the Klan toward Blacks, Catholics, and Jews. They did not tell us about the Tulsa massacre, the lynching of Blacks in the modern South, and other shameful events. Even today, in state after state, white-dominated legislatures are making it illegal to teach these things

 

The internet allows people to learn more than what is contained in constrained textbooks. Information is instantly available about both our greatness as a nation and our warts. Increasingly the well-educated populous peals a clarion call for history to be, “Accurately – and fully – taught.[i] That means that a lot of what we learned twenty, thirty, or even sixty years ago, and what we didn’t learn, requires reexamination, a different slant, and more truth. That will not be easy for many, especially for the person in The Villages in Florida a few months ago who raised his fist while driving his golf cart, shouting the need for “White Power.” It will not be easy for those who are doing everything possible to keep people from voting in the next election.

 

The Declaration says all people are created equal; some, like the Alabama sports fan, are upset that so many want the “law” enforced. It says that people have a right to life; they want the “law” enforced. The “law” says people should be able to pursue happiness; they want the “law” enforced.

 

Sometimes we overlook this section of the Declaration: “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men … “People want that “law” enforced as well. The purpose of our government is to ensure that we all enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In addition, people want the “WE” to include everyone.

 

So, what does July 4th mean to us? Rather, what should it mean to all of us? It should be an opportunity to celebrate our achievements in our progress toward the guiding principles of our founding documents. We have always said we are not a perfect union, but most take pride in making the effort. For too many, however, the guiding principles are simply words on paper, not their reality. We can change that if we want to.

 

If any of our actions, the actions of a group, or the government does anything to make one person less valuable than another person, it goes against the American spirit. We know those who flaunt un-Americanism in the name of patriotism: the Klan, private militias that invade state capitols, insurrectionists who invaded the US Capitol on January 6^th. We know about the banks that redline real estate loans, lending institutions that charge interest based on race, the school boards that create or tolerate racial or gender disparity of resources, and others that discriminate based on race, gender, religion, orientation, nationality, or other reasons. We can change the direction of the country if we want to.

 

All we have to do is agree that all people are equal and start treating them as equals. That is how we enforce the “law” written by the founding fathers.

 

 

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[i] Kathleen Parker – How long will people talk about critical race theory? -Washington Post – July 4, 2021

Shocked!

 

“There is no such thing as the united states.”[i]

I was shocked that a nationally recognized columnist came to that conclusion. He wrote those words in an essay about how the covid-19 pandemic should have brought us together as a nation but didn’t.

It is shocking to hear a sitting President tells us that our democracy is in peril.

It is shocking when a former Army General and National Security Advisor tells his followers that a military coup may be necessary for the US.

We see the divide in too many ways these days. A Member of Congress equates wearing a facemask, a standard public health measure, to the horrors of the Holocaust. In spite of or maybe because of her bellicose rhetoric, and that she is all but censured by Congress, Representative Green will be reelected by her constituents who relish the idea of a Member of Congress that opposes a unified country’s approach to anything.

The Governors took wildly differing measures to combat the virus, decisions based mostly on political whim and fear of The Donald, each pulling their own oar, rather than working as a team. It continues.

The nation’s insurrection on January 6, 2021, deemed so inconsequential by many members of Congress that they saw no need for an independent commission to investigate how it happened and how to prevent another. The British army invaded our Capitol in 1812. This time US citizens invaded our Temple of Democracy, trying to halt the counting of ballots, hell bent on destroying our free and democratic way of life. Some Members of Congress equated the invasion to a typical day of typical tourists visiting the building. When I toured the Capital, other visitors did not carry war-grade weapons, they did not bust down doors and windows; they did not take over the Senate chamber or the Well of the House, or call for the lynching of the Vice President and death to the Speaker.

The Arizona State Senate instituted a recount of the last election ballots to prove a fraudulent process that no one else has been able to find. They hired a conspiracy theorist to conduct the survey; his company, Cyber Ninja has zero experience in auditing or voting processes. The once private ballot of millions of Arizona voters is now, illegally, in the hands of unqualified folks searching for bamboo in the paper and other spurious theories. Yet, other state legislators are visiting the charade to determine if they should use the same company in their state.

States across the continent are passing new legislation aimed at reducing the number of people who will vote and making it harder for them to vote the next time around. Instead of making it easier for more people to vote, they are doing the opposite. Senator King called American democracy “a 240-year experiment that runs against the tide of human history,” and that tide usually leads … to authoritarianism.[ii] He said he feared the empowerment of state legislatures to decide election results more than the curtailment of the franchise.

Just imagine what it will be like when legislatures have the power, that they are enacting in several states, to overthrow the election results if they don’t like them. Why vote? Every American citizen who wants to vote should be able to register with minimum hassle; show the registrar their address and that they are over 18 years old, and that is sufficient. When it is time to vote, send registered voters a ballot, ask them to make their choices, and mail it back to the election office. Done!

Making voter registration difficult is voter suppression. Making absentee voting difficult is voter suppression. Reducing the number of places to drop off ballots is voter suppression. Reducing the number of hours to vote, or eliminating early voting is voter suppression. Allowing the state legislature to overturn election outcomes and appoint their own Presidential Electors is unconstitutional voter suppression.

We an open and free election in 2020 and there was no fraud, no packing of the ballot box by dead dictators in South America, or planeloads of ballots shipped in from China; nada. The effort to suppress the vote is not an organic process. It is sponsored by people who have decided that democracy does not work for them. Most of the proposed voter suppression bills in 20 or more states are almost identical. They are the result of super-PACs throwing money at the issue. They are the work of groups who write the proposed laws and then find sponsors in each state. When one suppresses the vote, makes it harder to vote, they are suppressing democracy.

A recent Ipso poll showed consequential data that QAnon duped a large cohort of people.[iii] Twenty-three percent of Republicans and 15% of all Americans believe the government, the financial system, and the media are led by satanic worshiping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation; that is nearly 49 million people. Twenty percent of Americans and 28 percent of Republicans believe a storm is coming that will sweep elites out of their positions and restore the country’s rightful leader. Fifteen percent of Americans believe true patriots must resort to violence to save the country. This is shocking! What the hell is happening to our country?

It is shocking to hear a reporter on Fox News complaining about how submissive schools and other agencies are to a government request to wear a mask to lower the risk of spreading a worldwide virus, one that is the cause 600,000 deaths in the US, and millions of others around the world. On an NBC news broadcast early this month an interviewee suggested that the government should not ask us to watch out for our fellow citizens when it comes to preventing the spread of covid, but that we should only be concerned with ourselves, because when the government asks you to watch for others, he said, that is communism. What?

A recent Simple Organic Life cartoon opined that most people do not really want the truth. They just want the constant reassurance that what they believe is the truth; they are willing to live with comforting lies rather than unpleasant truths.      

Democracies are more than laws and regulations. Free countries rely on people respecting institutions, working together, believing in their ideals and social norms, and their aspirations. The US democracy relies on citizens having a strong faith and belief in the founding documents.

Organizations, political parties, and individuals who try to limit who can vote and how they vote are not living up to the expectations of a free democratic country. Maybe we are no longer a group of united states, a nation of united people. Maybe our democracy and way of life really are in peril.

The good news is that those who are trying to bring down America are a small group. The bad news is that they control the power strings in about half of the states. The better news is that they do not have the support of the majority of the people of the country. They are outliers. They can be overcome.

The new voter suppression laws call for freedom-loving voters to get to the polls at the next election. The majority should be able to overcome the minority anti-democracy cabals.

                                                                                             

 

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[i] Leonard Pitts Jr. – Miami Herald, 5/25/21

[ii] New York Times –June 14, 2021

[iii] QAnon Conspiracy Theories, by Party Affiliation – Axios-Ipso survey – May 2021

 

 

The Government that Governs Least?

 

Henry David Thoreau taught us that the government that governs least governs best. Many of us grew up in cultures that insisted that any government that treaded beyond the red line of least was to be questioned, to be distrusted, and to be eradicated. The notion was and still is the balm of real conservatism in America.

 

The religion of small government shows its ideal in the Vermont Town Meeting, held early each March. That is where and when they approve the Town and School budget and taxes to support them, where locals can spout off on nearly any subject and get a respectful hearing. I attended one Town Meeting where there was near-unanimous agreement that the town should begin a kindergarten. Who could oppose that? Later in the meeting, the school budget and tax were approved. Neither included money for the kindergarten. People want things that they are not willing to pay for, sometimes.

 

John F Kennedy preached a form of politics that claimed that government could be a force for good, that it had the power to transform lives. That was, for the time, quite a radical idea, not to be trusted or supported. President Regan told us that government wasn’t the answer, but the problem. We believed that too, many still do.

 

Thoreau was right for his time. I wonder if his ideas are right for today’s America. It is a dividing issue for many. Good old-fashioned conservatism wrote the rubric of low taxes, little government, and self-reliance. The idea that we are all born equal, but on our own after that implies a level playing field and equal opportunity. That is our ideal, shouted loud and often, but not always our reality. We aren’t the agricultural nation of two or three centuries ago. We live, at least half of us, within fifty miles of the oceans, cramped into tall buildings or houses with small lots. Most of us can’t stand on our front porch and see forever, determined to move if we see the smoke rising from a distant chimney.

 

President Biden went before a covid-safe Congress to deliver a summary of his first 100 days and to lay out a far-reaching set of objectives for the next ten years. The first twitch for many was to call it over-reaching, too much, and too expensive. For many who yearn for the shores of Walden Pond, it was an infringement of states’ rights, government’s role in society, even socialistic to some, and by any measure, very expensive. But is it all bad?

 

To say the country changed in the last 50 years is an overwhelming understatement. Not all of us have conquered the maelstrom. Too many in retirement don’t see the need to catch up or want to catch up. It is that cohort of voters, however, who vote in high percentages, less and less each year but still influential. America is going the way of the kids in college, those getting ready for college, or those who were just graduated. They are setting the agenda for the next fifty years. Sometimes it has a ready-fire-aim feel to it. The young people, those under 40 years represent 51% of the population. Sixteen percent of all voters are under 30 years. We are at an inflection point in our history; we can almost see the curve of change as it happens.

 

Both political parties, when they controlled Congress and/or the White House, could not even agree on a plan to fix the roads and bridges. During those years of inaction, the definition of infrastructure changed. It is no longer simply highways and byways. Thirty-five percent of the students in this country do not have effective broadband. In 1936, Congress passed the Rural Electrification Act, which funneled money to electric cooperatives to help defray the cost of bringing electricity to the rural areas of the country. I remember going to farms with my father, an electrician, who made a living for many years wiring farmhouses and barns in the mountain towns. The last town to get electricity in my rural home state was 1963. The point is simple: the electric grid is part of our infrastructure, but so is broadband. In the US, 94% of the population has access to broadband, but 15 million people in rural areas lack reliable service. The TVA is infrastructure. The interstate highway system is infrastructure. Clean water is infrastructure. Think of Flint Michigan or of the two million people in the US who lack clean drinking water. Dirty water, failing bridges, pot-holed throughways, no broadband, failed electric power sources; is this the way we want the world to see America?

 

The pandemic opened the sores of our insecurity. Millions of people lined up for hours to get bags of free groceries because they did not have a job, through no fault of their own and they have to feed their family. Is this the US we want the world to see? Our healthcare system showed its vulnerability in emergencies. It needs fixing. The gap between white and minority wages, wealth, schools, and discrimination became evident during the pandemic. It needs to be narrowed or eliminated.

 

Without knowing it, many Americans have supported the dogma of subsidiarity: decisions and actions at the local level whenever possible, not by some centralized government, Locals will take care of their people unless they can’t. Locals should build infrastructure unless they can’t. Locals should ensure clean water unless they can’t. When we cannot do what needs to be done, we look for the next higher level of competence, maybe a county poverty agency, or a state police agency, or the county road commission, or …. While we hold fast to the belief in local relief, we recognize that some things need to be done nationally. Many of us remember trying to travel long distances across the country on two-lane highways before the interstate system was designed and built. That effort was called socialism by the way. The days of the small electrical systems left us a long time ago. Electric grids span the continent and electricity is bought and sold in the marketplace, just like so many other commodities.

 

The nation is no longer a conglomeration of small towns and large farms separate and distinct. We became, almost without realizing it, an intertwined network that requires national answers to national issues. We have the same number of acres or square miles, but vastly different needs than the previous century. Doing things as a nation does not register as socialism to me. It doesn’t take away our democracy. The interstate highway system didn’t divide us, it united us. The electrification of the country didn’t divide us; it made life better for millions of people. I am not sure that fixing our school buildings belongs in an infrastructure bill rather than in an education bill, but it is hard to argue that we don’t need a broadened definition of infrastructure. We need national solutions to national problems.

 

Americans by nature believe that we are the greatest nation on earth, especially because of our democratic form of government. For years, we could brag about how our standard of living was so much higher than the rest of the world. Mostly that was true. But, when you consider that 43% of Americans have never left the country, or that 11% of Americans have never left the state in which they were born, it is hard for them to conceive of the idea that other countries are catching up. They haven’t experienced trains that run at 300 mph or brand new 4-8 lane expressways with more miles than our total interstate highway system. It is hard to imagine countries with wide-spread broadband so prevalent that one hardly needs cash anymore because transactions are by phone or tap cards. We can’t catch up with the world by simple local effort. The country needs big improvements, big ideas to help it maintain a leadership role in the world. We need to go big! We need to go at it as a nation united. Over 80% of the population agrees. The only ones fighting the idea are some members of Congress. America won’t be great again, or better if we don’t rebuild ourselves. Henry David might not like it, but it’s time for a change. A bit of big government can’t be all bad at this juncture in our journey to a more perfect union.