Hello…
What really upsets me about war, and not so much “standing armies war,” or insurgency war, but how this society relates to the very concept. My problem at this moment is with the people who have the power to make war. For them is it is no longer the weapon of ultima ratio (for you tea party nascar republicans, “ultima ratio” is latin for “last resort”), rather, it is the premier option for politicians on both sides of the republican/democrat divide.
I’m going to dive into the subject of war in the next several posts to this blog. Of course I’m certain I will interrupt the series with other posts on matters at hand.
In this particular post you are reading right now, I’m not going to discuss war between nation states, because I’m so certain I’ll deal with that enough in the years to come, I can safely leave it out of this post. The wars I want to discuss over the next few posts is the right wing’s war on people.
The reactionary forces in this nation, given voice within the FOX nation, have been raising the volume of their banshee style wailing in the last six years. Their cries have been driven to a fever pitch by their manifest, racist hatred of our president, and it’s extremely dangerous. To use my own phrase: “If our beloved republic is to survive, the tea party must be marginalized.”
I am convinced that these people wish to return this society to some fantasy-laiden era before women could vote, before blacks were anything more than chattel, and before any immigrant who wasn’t definitely European could come here and expect anything more than frequent beatings for the first generation and a half. If you want what they callously called “rights,” you’d better be “free, white, and twenty-one”…oh yeah, and have male equipment dangling between your legs. Sorry, guys, but we’re in the 21st century now, and we’re not going back with you…Take Idaho as your giant time machine, it’s yours. The humans in your midst will be more than happy to send you on your own “trail of tears.”
I’m going to discuss each issue in brief and perhaps offer partial solutions for working around them, so let’s get this romper room started, shall we?
1. The war against poor people’s right to vote. Nothing says “My political philosophy is completely bankrupt” faster and with more clarity than seeking ways to deny people who probably disagree with you the right to legally cast a vote. Beyond that, nothing says, “I don’t have the intellectual capacity of a three-toed sloth” faster and with more clarity than trying to mask your intentions behind falsely applied statistics and anecdotal stories relating to minority voters and their voting habits.
When these bankrupt unter-sloths raise their swords in battle, what is their weapon of choice? Nazi-era legislation efforts to require photo identification at polling stations, of course! They scare the nascar republicans half to death with the possibility that thousands of illegal immigrants may be on the voting rolls and casting ballots. Holy shit!
Okay, before everybody starts writing to the FCC about my use of French, I have to admit that there is that possibility (even the reality) that this problem exists. However, if and when it occurs, there means by which to fix the problem without infringing on peoples’ right to vote, without profiling people who are of any number of the rainbow of brownish hues, or who are obviously not shareholders in the trickle-down piss pot out of which the poor must drink every day.
I and the other pastors of my church work with homeless communities on a daily basis, and one of the pervasive aspects of chronic homelessness is the lack of proper identification. Many if not most of the people required to live in this quagmire possess neither a birth certificate nor a social security card. When you are homeless these things tend to become lost, or more commonly, stolen. This is not a condition of just the homeless among us, but of those who live below the poverty line in general.
New birth certificates are not free, and even if a homeless person can scrape up the money to request one from the state in which they were born, they rarely have a valid address to which such a document can be sent. With the exponential growth of the homeless population in America, the political right seems quite willing to not only cast these people into the abyss as liabilities on their balance sheet of human beings, but to also disenfranchise the lot of them in order to occupy political seats by…yes…what turns out to be fraudulent means.
When you’re quite willing to deny hundreds of thousands of “born here, gonna die here” homeless and impoverished americans the right to vote because you’re worried about 2,500 possible fraudulently cast ballots in a state like Florida with a population of 19.9 million, then something is wrong with you. That 2,500 people amounts to 1.25 ten thousandths of a percent of the population. Shit, I can’t see even a complete foaming-at-the-mouth-nut-job-tea-partier spend time on that (well, maybe), so if the end game is not the few illegal immigrants who are voting, it must be a larger chunk of the population. Perhaps it’s something like hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of poor and homeless people in the state. Perhaps they’re afraid that if everybody who is a red, white, and blue balls american voted, the friggin’ Bolsheviks would be running this joint; which might even be the truth, given the way the gap between the haves and have nots is widening in this country. Let’s face it, someday, the workers of the world will have to unite or perish…but I digress. Maybe they’re afraid the democrats would be running things, I don’t know. It certainly wouldn’t be the republicans.
As I said in the 1st post to this blog, people who reach positions of power in any organization are not stupid. These people are not stupid, they know exactly what they are doing, and what they do is testimony to bankruptcy of their political philosophy. They know, after all, that the more poor people who vote, the fewer the number of seats their deplorable cronies will occupy in the halls of government. Elections are something they fear. They have not the courage to confront instances of fraud on an individual basis and call out the guilty parties to the media or the courts, so they opt for their nuclear option: mass disenfranchisement of the poor.
I could go on, but I’m not going to, mainly because I want to keep these posts brief, but also because I’d start foaming at the mouth. Instead, I’m going to offer a word of advice to those of the political left: If you are involved in defiling the voter registration rolls with fraudulent voters…STOP. You don’t need to do this (that’s like talking to some vengeance filled dude in a movie who’s about to go on a killing spree…for justice). You don’t need to lower yourself to the level of your opposition, because all you are doing is feeding their fire. Concentrate your efforts on A) making sure all eligible voters have what they need to vote and actually vote, and B) acquiring legal status for the immigrant populations with whom you are in contact. That being said…
The question, then, is how do we fight these efforts at mass disenfranchisement on a practical, grass-roots level. The best and easiest way is to help the poor and homeless acquire and maintain proper, photographic identification. In order to do this, there must me a working alliance between both secular and pastoral progressive groups. Although such will require money, it will require much less than one might think, because, after all, it is only the poorest of the poor, and those who suffer great mental illness who will not be able to come up with the money to acquire proper identification.
1. Talk to people about how important it is that they vote and get them registered.
2. Carpool to the polling station.
3. Start a file for each person. Used filing cabinets are pretty much free and can be found with little effort. The files to go in them are cheap too.
4. For the homeless, offer to keep their birth certificate and ID in a safe, secure place. Their file would be a good place. For the poor who have housing, offer to keep their birth certificate.
5. Get the word out that you’re working on making sure every eligible voter has what they need to vote, and network with other groups.
6. Open a P. O. Box and allow the homeless in your community to use it as an address at which to receive mail. It’s only $56.00 per year.
7. Don’t be afraid, for if what you do is good in the eyes of God, he will not abandon you. He will keep you safe from the forces of the evil one who are certain to oppose you. This is the most important reason anyone involved in fraudulent voter registration should stop.
8. Love those who are your enemies. There is enough hatred in this world to go around, and hatred is the tool of the enemy. Love those you are trying to help have their voice heard, but more importantly, love those who oppose you, and pray for them.
9. Love God with everything you are and love your neighbor as yourself.
Peace and love to all,
Niemand