The Real Problem With Restricted Voting

 I do not expect I am going to be long or well remembered outside my family when I do pass away, but I can pretty much guarantee that the names of those people currently working to restrict voting will be long remembered.

If it is through history books on how to really damage a democracy which recovered and survived, I'm fine with that.  If it's in vague terms as they are remembered as the real engineers who destroyed America, I'd be pretty bummed.  But they don't seem to understand how fragile and delicate a democracy is.  And I suppose it wouldn't occur to those sorts of people who only see the power in the system and their greedy desire to control it.

Because it's pretty painfully obvious to someone like me - any system of government is going to be as strong and as supported as the people who are invested in it.  That is, if a majority of your citizens have the opportunity to vote, and to share the control of that system, that system will remain strong.  If you start chiseling off bits of the electorate, and start eliminating everyone who doesn't look or think like you, pretty soon a majority of the people outside the system will see the system as the problem.

Don't believe me?  Read a history book.  Or hell, browse a few old magazine racks.  Yes, I am over fifty years old.  And as disturbing as that is to me, it does give me a little bit of perspective, that which most of the people currently fondling the voting restriction bills which they seek to implant in our system of government.  

Because they're fools.  And while I know I'm not going to get anywhere by insulting anyone, there is a time to call an idiot an idiot.  Even if they don't get it, they're still idiots.  And I do happen to have enough of a memory to remember the nightly news in the late 1960s and early 1970s.  You see, at that time, we had this spectacular thing going on where we were putting people into a ... well, a tin can, essentially, and flinging it out into the sky.  And it went so far that it could, for a while, fall around this planet.  And some even went all the way out to the moon.  I know, it's kind of hard for kids today to believe we put men on the moon.  And if I didn't have the education or experience that I got, I might consider it a bit of a fantastic story.  Which it is.  But human history is filled with fantastical stories - many of them actually became true.  I mean, we will never know the name of the first fellow to gingerly extend his foot down to the ground, and stay there.  Or the fellow who took a bit of material which was already burning and use it in a controlled fashion.  

What about the guy who decided to try the stuff coming out of the cow's udder?  There's a real brave fellow.  I mean, honestly, what in all that you might find holy would possess you to lie down under a cow, which likely outweighed the fellow by at least three to five times his own weight, and try ... well, we call it "milk" now.  But someone had to be the first.

And yeah, it sounds crazy when you put it that way, but the dairy industry didn't spring out of thin air.  And once you get your mind wrapped around that, how about cheese?  I mean, what went wrong with someone that they said "let's put that jug of milk in a dark, cool spot, then wipe off the fuzz and try what's left"?  

And so yes, we had a space program.  And what is more appropriate to the beginning of this discussion, is that at about the same time we were flinging men off the planet, we were also throwing men and bullets at other men, who wanted to decide how they would be governed.  Or perhaps we wanted to make sure they decided to stay our friends.  Or maybe history was all about us trying to carry through and break promises we made to someone else because we didn't like how things were looking.

Which is, I suppose, the real and true history of America.  But getting back to it, when this small country, known at the time as South Viet Nam, decided they wanted to be our friends and be independent, they really pissed off the folks to their north, some of whom were rather solidly supported by the Chinese, who believe to this day that their particularly warped brand of what we call Communism is best for everyone.  Well, funny thing - most folks tend not to do well in a system like that.  But there are some folks at the top of such a system who are extremely motivated to keep it that way.  Because they get to control it.

And the key difference between their system and ours is that we regularly change out some of the parts.  Yeah, some of the parts tend to need more changing before they get changed, and therein lies one of the problems.  But we were getting back to those invested in the system.  And during most of the 1960s, the United States Government had a bit of a vested interest in young people going to work for it in a fairly dangerous job.  And to be perfectly blunt, it wasn't every young person.  It was only those young men who weren't smart enough or well-connected or rich enough to figure a way out.  I mean, there were people like Private Bone Spurs, who had a doctor write a note which said that they wouldn't do well on their feet for long periods.  And other folks who could afford to attend college because their folks had money and there wasn't the amounts of federal aid there is these days.  While others just flat out ran.  Or avoided getting the mail or a phone call.  Because the little bit of service they were seeking to avoid was the Draft, which wasn't where a sport team picked you to pay and play for them - nope.  You got to get a special hair cut, go through some pretty difficult training, and then you got shipped off to a hot steamy swampy part of the world where, when it comes to the general living degree of difficulty, they did away with things like hypothermia which I get to deal with about six months out of the year living in Minnesota, and instead, you get to avoid a fair number of poisonous creatures because they don't die off during a cold snap, and they combine all of that with heavy jungle cover, and men who have firearms which are loosely assembled and sloppy, but a sloppy bullet kills you just as dead as a very accurate bullet when it decides to go through the same space-time location your chest happens to be inhabiting.  

So these young people, many of whom hadn't even been able to vote, yet, in an election, were packaged up and shipped off to a jungle which did a horrifically good job of killing them.  And those it didn't kill it maimed, damaged, or disfigured.  And then just to make sure no one forgot, we weren't yet smart enough to understand that when we sprayed fancy new chemicals at the enemy, we also got some of the blowback.  And those who may have seemed to come out of the jungles without a scratch came home with psychological scars and wounds that were much harder to diagnose, treat, and cure.  

So when you have a pretty large number of people who are absolutely convinced that they haven't got a voice in the system, their friends are likely to suffer and die before they get to attain any sort of measure of what the older folks called "success" you find that those people are going to make it clear they aren't going to put up with that sort of shit.  They complain.  They protest.  They ignore the general social norms and expected behavior, and they'll fight armed men and men with clubs because they outnumber them and can overwhelm them.  

And if they don't, the other piece of it is that, even if they die in such a confrontation, there's a good chance that someone standing by with a camera might see it - and if they're arrested, or killed, that tragedy might motivate others to speak out and try to change the system.

So what's the likely outcome we'll see if the nitwits and fuckwits manage to restrict voting to those people who look and behave like they do?  It'll be pretty simple.  We saw it here in Minneapolis last summer when a group of people felt fairly certain they were not being respected or treated fairly.  And they weren't.  And they were heard by many - now, if their efforts do result in lasting positive change in the system, I'll be all in favor of it.  Because I learned long ago that any sort of warped, twisted system would end up being a problem.  

Because if a system was set up to favor me, eventually, someone would figure out how to change that to favor themselves, instead. And I guess that makes me a wiseass.  Or a wise old man, I don't know.  But I do know that if a system isn't fair, it is not to my advantage to be part of it.  Because if it is favored towards me, it may be that it could be changed to favor someone else.  Or it may be that someone who sees the system as disfavoring them may simply seek to remove all of those who are favored from the system with fairly permanent methods.  And I can't blame them for doing it.  Because if you're not a member of a fair system, and are constantly feeling left out, cheated, or abused, you're going to do something to change that.  

So it takes a special sort of stupid to think they can build a "better" system which favors someone.  It's incredibly, painfully moronic to think that restricting voting won't lead to a weaker system.  Sure, it might benefit you for a short period, but that also makes you a target.  And if the time and the ... well, the human capital decides to be motivated to do something about it, I'll be 100% in favor of making certain that it does come to an end.  Sooner rather than later.

So if you're in favor of restricting voting, ask yourself why.  What is the outcome you seek?  Do you seek to insure only legitimate voters can vote?  Okay, who, to you, is a legitimate voter?  Is it someone who looks and thinks like you?  Or is it someone who owns the same sort of car and house you do?  

Because if that's your yardstick, then no, we're not on the same page.  I am 100% in favor of setting age limits.  I'm also in favor of requiring some sort of registration, and confirming that you are a legitimate voter.  No, that does not mean requiring photo IDs - unless you are prepared to support the issuing of free photo IDs to anyone who can dial a phone or visit a web site. Beyond that, well, I don't see any other need to restrict voting.  

If you do, then be prepared to have your right to vote restricted.  Because sooner or later someone will take an unfair system and use it against you.  And you will not like it when it happens, because it damned well will.