So VOTE, Damn It!!

This blog is either quite late for last week, or a tad early for next week.  But, the timing is right, I hope.

The fact that so many people didn’t bother to vote in the last election really bothered me.  As an almost member of the Greatest Generation (missed it by 3 years), watching as my cousins, friends and brother went in the Navy in WWII, worrying over whether they would be wounded, or worse, killed fighting against countries wherein the citizens could not vote, or else could vote for one candidate, and were jailed, or worse, if they didn’t vote for that one person, I was most distressed, to say the least.

Then I read that the son of a good friend of mine didn’t vote because he couldn’t see the point, and that bothered me to the point that I decided to write a blog about it.  Fortunately, life, in a good way, got in the way of having the time to write because the events of this past week have emphasized in my mind the importance of voting.

Sunday will be the 50^th year anniversary of the march of black citizens of this country crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge to protest the fact that black citizens were denied the right to vote by all sorts of techniques such as cumulative poll taxes and difficult literacy tests.  There were about 600 marchers who were told they could not cross the bridge and who refused to stop marching.  They were then attacked by police officers who beat them with billy clubs, sending some 50 marchers to the hospital, including John Lewis, now a respected Congressman from Alabama.  They regrouped, marched again a few days later, and were turned back again.  A few days later, they marched again and crossed the bridge.  These protests led to the voting rights act of 1965.

Fast forward to this week.  I would imagine that anyone reading this blog has heard about the scathing report from the US Attorney General’s Office regarding the really horrendous situation in Ferguson, MO, and the reasons the community erupted so forcefully after the shooting of the black teen-ager, Michael Brown.  What has also emerged from the mess in Ferguson is that over time, and probably with discouragement from the non-black side of town, was that the black community in Ferguson did not vote.  And they ended up with a government that had no regard for them whatsoever to the point of using them to fund the government by arresting the black citizens for specious reasons, then imposing outrageous fines for arrests.  And, if the individuals could not pay the fine, putting them in jail!  The citizens of Ferguson are now organizing themselves to register citizens, and then making sure they get to the polls because they have recognized that they need to vote for a government that will regard them as the lawful citizens that they are.

So what does this have to do with me?  I’m not black, nor even maybe brown.  I’m OK.

First they came for the Communists,

and I didn’t speak up,

because I wasn’t a Communist.

Then they came for the Jews,

and I didn’t speak up,

because I wasn’t a Jew.

Then they came for the Catholics,

and I didn’t speak up, because I was a Protestant.

Then they came for me,

and by that time

there was no one left to speak up for me.  

There is an offshoot of Christianity called the Dominionists.  These folks want to make the United States a Dominionist Christian nation by being elected to local, then state and federal offices, school boards, special district boards, etc. thereby gaining control over all of our governmental institutions.  Google them if you think I am off center on this.  For the sake of the argument, let’s assume the Dominionists win.  There is no way I could subscribe to the government they want to impose.  But if I don’t speak up now for the black citizens of all of the Fergusons of this country, how can I demand that people speak up for me if the Domionists are in power, if there would be any left to do so.

There is another old, but excellent, maxim.  Injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere.  We all must register and vote; we all must start attending local board meetings, including the Board of Supervisors, and demand that these meetings be conducted in a civil and respectful manner, whether we want to go or not.  We must respectfully demand that people of all ages have a reason for voting, and that they recognize that if they want to enjoy the benefits of democracy, they sure as hell need to work for those benefits by at least voting.  Voting is the primary requirement of citizenship in a democracy.