Note: I wrote the piece that follows more than a month ago, but it disappeared into the deep, dark files of my computer. I discovered it when I sat down to write about more current events: the Afghanistan withdrawal, the climate catastrophe, Supreme Court cowardice, the willingness of governors to risk school kids’ lives, the Wild West (i.e., Texas)… and whatever else makes this moment feel like Armageddon. Unfortunately writing about all that might take a year and a day (well, maybe not), so I decided in the interim, I’d run the following piece. Maybe, by now, it will all seem tame.
As time wears on, so do I. “Wears on,” a vague expression, implies that time passes tediously. Typically, we don’t say that a person “wears on,” but right now, I feel that’s what I’m doing. Living in a country half crazed and half sane is exhausting. So much makes no sense.
We profess to believe in equality, yet as of July 14th, 18 of our states had passed 30 laws making it more difficult for constituents to cast ballots. Mail-in and early voting are more difficult; voter ID requirements, more stringent; voter purges, more likely. In all, more than 400 bills to restrict voting access have been introduced in 49 states.
By the time you read this, there will surely be more, all brought to us by the Republicans, who are so unable to develop voter friendly policies that they failed to create a platform for the 2020 campaign, apparently having decided they couldn’t win on the merits and erroneously believing their presidential candidate was too big to fail. Turns out he was just too big.
Then there’s the recount charade in Arizona, carried out by the playful sounding Cyber Ninjas (a group that has not been legally certified to do that kind of work) and apparently financed by an assortment of pro-Trump sources ranging from the Arizona Republican party to L. Lin Wood, identified as a “QAnon-promoting attorney.”
At least the attempts to undermine free and fair elections, while despicable, make sense in their own despicable way. There is the whisper of logical thought: If you can’t win by appealing to the voters, try to win by keeping the ones you don’t like from voting in the first place.
What makes no sense … what gives rise to rumination in the middle of the night … what defies all reason … is the conflation of health and politics.
Refusing the Covid vaccine is like marching off to a war without a cause. How do people not understand that? The specter of death seems to be no deterrent.
We have a certain amount of craziness built into our system …
- An electoral college that makes it possible for the presidential candidate with the fewest votes to “win”
- Senate rules that make it possible for a minority of the members to block legislation favored by the majority
- A Supreme Court whose members are appointed for life in a willy-nilly fashion: the luck of the draw, so to speak, by whoever happens to be president when a justice dies or resigns—unless, of course, one person, the majority leader of the senate, elected by the voters of one state, chooses to block the appointees confirmation
Now, one of our political parties is determined to make life even crazier--and not in a good way.
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