"VOTING"

 "VOTING"

        Voting for the midterm elections began last week, and it is helpful to think of the period before November 8 as the time of voting, rather than the usual name of "early voting."  I prefer to think of November 8 not as election day, but rather the end of the period of voting.  That shift in thinking implies to me that voting is so important in the USA that a period of at least 3 weeks is needed for voting, so that everyone who is eligible will have an opportunity to vote.  If you have not voted yet, please take time to do so this week, or at least by November 8.  It is vital in every election, but it is especially important this year, because this may be our last legitimate election, depending on the outcomes. 

        The first time that I was eligible to vote was in 1968, and while I took voting seriously, I chose not to vote in the presidential election between Democrat Hubert Humphrey and Republican Richard Nixon.  I had watched the debacle in Chicago at the Democratic convention that summer, and I was a Eugene McCarthy supporter.  I felt that McCarthy had been mistreated at the convention, and I also felt that justice had been squashed by the police state tactics of Mayor Richard Daley.  The recent movie about the Chicago Seven will give you some of the dynamics of those times, if you do not know them.  After the convention, I joined thousands of others who decided not to vote in protest of the oppressive tactics of the Democrats in Chicago. Richard Nixon was elected President by a narrow margin, and I've always wondered if our disenchantment and refusal to vote gave us one of the most corrupt presidents until Donald Trump.

        The context of the struggles of 1968 are instructive to us in these days.  The Voting Rights Act, passed three years before in 1965, had ended neo-slavery in the South.  Its empowerment of Black  voting was at the heart of the wrestling in Chicago.  The right to vote for Black people - a the 15th Amendment of 1870 - was finally ratified by law in 1965.  The Voting Rights Act took a giant step towards the political empowerment of people whose humanity had been denied in the US Constitution.  My decision not to vote in 1968 looks so much worse in that context - a privileged white man deciding that the blood, sweat, tears, and deaths of so many people over so long a time was not worth enough to vote.  1968 also brought the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.  It seemed like a time on the brink of chaos, and voting seemed so insignificant to me that year.

        Over the decades, I have seen the importance of voting.  I remember that when my mother was the lead instructor in the school of cosmetology in her local community college, she would not allow her students to come to class on Election Day if they did not have on a "I Have Voted" sticker.  I also note how much our white culture has worked to restrict access to voting since the end of neo-slavery in 1965.  In a terrible decision in 2013, SCOTUS struck down a central enforcement mechanism of the Voting Rights Act.  Ever since then, states around the country have constricted the right to vote again and again, hoping to return us to the vision of the "originalists," those who would limit voting to "white" men of property.

        We are in such a time of retrenchment now.  We see it in the "election deniers," who demean any election results that do not show them or their candidates as the winners of the election.  Donald Trump was the most prominent of these "deniers," but he is not the first nor the last to take this approach.  It has been a theme in American history ever since the Constitution denied the vote to women and defined African-American and Indigenous People as 60% human.  The "originalists" want to take us back to those days, and in many ways that is a main theme of the midterm elections of 2022.  Will we continue to to affirm the idea that all people are created equal and that all American citizens are entitled to vote?  Will we continue to affirm the idea that the people should continue to decide who our political leaders will be?

        We've tried this experimental idea of democracy for only 57 years now, since the end of neo-slavery with the Voting Rights Act.  That Act has already been significantly weakened, but still most of us have the right to vote.  Many candidates in these midterm elections of 2022 want to weaken that Act even more.  These "originalists" understand the power of the vote, and they want to restrict it as much as possible.  Caroline and I have already voted, and I urge you not to reflect my 1968 self in your approach to voting especially this year.  As President Obama put it so succinctly:  "Don't boo - Vote!"  May it be so with us.  If we don't, many of us may lose that fundamental right.