My grandmother was a suffragist. She fought hard and picketed on President Wilson’s White House lawn, or as close as she could get to it!
Therefore, I am not recused from voting, no matter how much of a burden it feels.
I did have fun voting for mayor and council members this August 3. I got to personally talk with each representative interested in representing my area. They actually responded well to receiving The Contributor and promised to read my articles.
I had some great teachers in grade school and high school, who taught a thing that I noticed is no longer being taught. That is what is now known as Critical Thinking: how to notice when someone is framing the argument for you instead of allowing you to look at the facts and frame the questions yourself.
Socrates was the first known scholar to develop the ideas behind rational analysis.
When people only react randomly or emotionally, without really being able to evaluate underlying motives, we have a disaster.
Propaganda was used to chilling effect on the under educated German population before World War II.
We think we have developed more savvy, but the truth is that many people in the South and in poor populations that are mined for soldiers, janitors and factory workers are taught to respect and obey authority.
Of course, respecting someone who has more responsibilities than you is wise. But questioning authority is our civic duty. Because of the hard work that the Vietnam Veterans did to enable soldiers to have a few rights when fighting a war, we now all have the responsibility to challenge authority figures if we see that they are heading down a destructive or immoral path.
This law is framed as “ The Duty to Disobey.” Naturally, there are very restricted circumstances under which this is OK, but if you ignore it, you could also be thrown in jail for violating the Constitution of the United States, committing a crime, or “just following orders.”
In voting, the same ideas apply. Trump decided to accuse the U.S. Postal Service of mishandling our mail, so the written ballots would not be admissible in our voting process. Millions of people ignored him.
The startling results brought up the suspicion that perhaps our voting machines are still unethical.
Who knows how far Diebold Nixdorf’s influence stretches? Machines and computers most certainly can easily be tampered with. We had real voting results when everyone decided to mail in their ballots. What is your opinion on this?
If my suspicions are correct, then perhaps we should adopt a method that Canada uses. It is super high-tech. They use pen and paper. There are citizens supervising the papers when they get put in the ballot boxes, and there are quite a few citizens of all political persuasions supervising the ballot count. Because they stretch so far from west to east, by the time the eastern votes are counted, all the other votes are already counted. So there is no real delay in the tally.
This reminds me of when the Soviets were ahead of us in documenting what they were observing in space because their astronauts were able to just use pencil and paper instead of waiting for a high-tech company to develop a pen that would write in space.
Many times, the best solution is the simplest. It is the one that already exists.
So, as women, poor folk, [there are many more poor women than men, BTW] and other groups who have been traditionally marginalized, it is our duty to study up as best we can, ask lots of questions, pester the librarians and generally make a nuisance of ourselves in order to try to understand issues of our day. To know the people who would like to show up on our behalf in various committee meetings, etc.
It is also our duty to pester the people we actually vote for! This is onerous. It’s a lot like paying bills. But perhaps if we all devoted, maybe 15 minutes to half an hour per week into just looking at things and the people who run our government, not relying on other hucksters, or people who make money off of selling scare tactics but on actual facts, we could be worthy of our grandmothers’ efforts.