Hangin' on

What a wild time to not be doing something different

I’m incensed and largely useless. That’s my problem today.

I’m can’t stop reading about the President aggressively going after oversight — effectively, I should add, given the complicity of his party in his behavior — and, even worse, anti-democracy efforts by one of America’s political parties around the nation. There are enough examples of this that I don’t need to highlight any particular instance from the past few weeks.

It’s acceptable to be a terrible President, to a certain degree, as the democratic process should provide redress to the people of the nation to vote against its leader, their party, and anyone upholding their policies. But when we continually chip away at the ability of certain people to vote, and we see elections regularly decided by thin margins, I can’t help but view our democracy as fading.

Anyone opposed to an open and free franchise is opposed to democracy. And our political media couches arguments relating to ballot-access in partisan terms, as if the right to vote was little more than a shuttlecock to be bandied about, a topic of conversation and something fit for punditry instead of something that should be inviolate, immovable, and a shared bedrock.

I’m beside myself that we allow political movements to limit voting access of groups of people — usually based on race — and carry on as if this was all ok, something that just happens, and about which we can do nothing.

Our children will read the history of today and judge us for our failings.

And all the while, I’m not working on the issue. I’m just doing my day job and making dinner at night. I hope my hoped-for children press me one day and I tell them I failed. I’ll ask them to do better.