Month: November 2018

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Texas wants to straighten out straight-party ballots and voters

They’re not fooling me one bit: the Texas Legislature and all the work they’ve been a-doin’ from the Clinton to the Obama administrations, gerrymandering precincts and now disallowing voters to select the straight-party option.  I remember during the 20th century when local Republican and Democratic party chairs recommended all voters simply check the straight-party option conveniently located at the top of the ballot, each party chair maintaining theirs had the best and most outstanding candidates in all races.  In that bygone era the party elders just wanted to make it easy on voters since so many if not most don’t vote at all.  Too, they knew most voters don’t bother researching each and every race such as all those district judgeships and state commissions—names we’ve never heard of let alone the duties of each office.

Yeah, we’re just a bunch of ignert ol’ hicks spread out all over this great big Lone Star state like a swipe of mustard on a bun.  All right, maybe ignorance is kinda true for a lot of voters, folks just pickin’ names on the ballot based on vague familiarity and past acquaintances from high school and church (no one we really know or heard of running for office) or to quote the late Molly Ivins when Texas voters chose ‘cute’ names on the ballot and in the process voted for “the wrong Don Yarborough.”  Mostly straight-ticket voters are probably sticking to the political party with which they define themselves and likely always have.

My fellow Texans, it’s gonna be up to us to decide how we gonna play this game called e-lek-shuns.  And it’s gotta start with knowing the difference between Republicans and Democrats.

Grandpa knew the difference

My grandfather was asked this question by his children.  Back in those days, he intently listened to the news on the radio as well as read the daily newspaper.  He took our nation’s history and voting privilege very seriously, and as a poor man trying to provide for his ever-expanding family he sought some kind of ray of hope, of financial stability on the horizon.  He was, of course, devoted to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  Grandpa  taught his children: Democrats care about the common man while Republicans care about money.  Simple response from a not-so-simple man living in desperately hard times.  I don’t know if he ever perceived how the two governing concepts go hand in hand.

So the old Depression-era distinction or belief in the two parties continued until the 1960s, when if you can believe it, people down South switched party affiliations like … hmm, like it was the end of the world.  The switcheroo had to do with the Civil Rights movement and the presidency of Lyndon Johnson.  Southern Democrats were gonna have to support African Americans, simple as that.  Instead many white Democrats ran lickety-split to the Republicans, whose political agenda never promoted the advancement of people of color.

Then there was the hippy factor and the Vietnam War, separating American voters into hawks and doves.  Doves just wanted to make love not war; hawks were ready to fight for any reason anywhere—something like that.  Then American politics got really ugly in the ’70s with radical Democrats, college youth completely dissatisfied with the status quo by the Man.  To be a Democrat in those days implied one may support violent protests at home to end the war overseas.  A generation gap evolved with Democrats usually younger voters and Republicans their parents.

Ready for his close up

Enter Ronald Reagan, the law-and-order governor of Hippie California.  Americans generally forgot he used to be a Democrat before switching to the GOP.  Why?  It’s no mystery but one that needs reviewing.  His wealth increased and so did his tax rate.  He no longer believed that government could and should solve all the country’s problems.  He believed government was the problem.  Many Democrats, former liberals who at the time were parents of the Mini Boom, agreed.  They were called Reagan Democrats.

So we’re back to the two-pronged philosophy of our country divided by Democrats and Republicans.  Clinton’s presidency brought together the parties.  His style was called Business Democrats, AKA New Democrats, and he was quite adept at using tax revenue to build and create new business especially in neglected communities.  Did I mention he is credited for balancing the federal budget and erasing the deficit to $0?  That feat was not mere luck but phenomenal economic foresight.

Money is the root

A government teacher taught the difference between Democrats and Republicans by quipping: Republicans see a cockroach and call an exterminator while Democrats see one and stomp it with a shoe.  Democrats keep their curtains open when they shouldn’t while Republicans, though unnecessary, keep their curtains closed.  Shtick was his way to answer the age-old American question, “What’s the difference between a Democrat and a Republican?”

I think the answer is similar to the difference between Missionary and Southern Baptists.  It’s about where the money goes based on the priorities of the organization.  Republicans believe, in the paraphrased adage of President Cal Coolidge, the business of America is business.  Business has to be good for the little guy to prosper, for anyone to prosper.  A fair point.  Democrats believe government should help the little guy when he cannot take care of himself through employment, education, food and healthcare.  An altruistic notion.

So now, how have the two long-standing American political Parties come to blows, like sending mail bombs to big-name Democrats, over how the money’s spent?  What the hell?  Some say the animosity came from the Democrats doing in President Richard Nixon.  Others say the hatred seeped in when Republican political know-it-all Newt Gingrich created a list of adjectives to use whenever speaking about Democratic opponents.  Such words that would eventually be tied to all Democrats include: liberal, sick, pathetic, weak, corrupt, destructive, intolerant, insensitive, radical, traitors, self-serving, selfish, incompetent.  Hold on just a cotton-pickin’ minute!  Don’t all these words describe some Republican leaders, too, or anybody for that matter?  Goodness gracious.

That list of adjectives cleverly devised to stick it to Democrats along with the modern internet age of fast-paced political arguments have escalated the so-called major differences between political Parties to a deadly battle of sorts, still without declaring civil war … yet … again.

Straight-jacket politics

Back to the original subject, the straight-party ticket may not be the smartest way to vote especially in the Information Age when voters really should look up any candidate and read about him or her and decide for ourselves who we like or trust.  But the straight-party ticket obviously has been used in recent national elections as a protest vote, one that clearly tells the other Party in charge: “I can no longer sit back and let your side ruin the country, in my humble opinion as an American citizen, taxpayer and voter.”  The straight-party vote was more or less a ‘fed-up’ and ‘throw-the-bums out’ maneuver … one that a sore-head Party decided to take away from all of us.  The straight-party vote was just too overwhelming and powerful and maybe primarily used by Democrats.

Some say all the other states do not allow a straight-party line on their election ballots, so Texas should follow suit.  Why I never thought I’d live to see the day Texas would want to be like all the other states in the Union.  Our elected officials in Austin may say this is for our own good, like making a kid drink milk, that using our brains to make a decision as crucial as voting for the right Don Yarborough is literally life or death.  It’s life and death all right, of expanding political thought, social movement and cultural change.  But hey, we’re all Americans.  Democrats and Republicans have too much in common to want to kill the other side.  Right?

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God bless immigrants … because America doesn’t want to anymore

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

the wretched refuse of your teeming shores.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

 

Whack!  Off with her head!!  Seems Der Spiegel over in Germany was right all along about President Donald Trump.  Right after the 2016 election, the European news journal ran a cover cartoon depiction of Trump: holding in one hand a bloody sword while the other held up the bleeding head of the Statue of Liberty.  The revolting editorial cartoon, in color for the macabre, was supposed to be political satire based on Trump’s agenda if and when elected U.S. president.  His first order of business was to stop immigration (soft-pedaled as illegal immigration).  The Statue of Liberty has long been a world renowned symbol of America’s embrace of immigrants regardless of nationality, race, ethnicity or religion.

And now President Trump’s plan to halt immigration, specifically of Latin Americans, is coming to fruition right after the 2018 midterm election.  He and he alone ordered the U.S. military to protect the border.  There are two conflicts with the presidential order.  One is illegal immigration, already handled by federal border patrol agents.  Then there is the issue of asylum.

Any former American school student must find it hard to believe the United States will no longer provide asylum to Latin American refugees, whether they walked a thousand miles in a massive crowd or crossed the border as a family with children.  Border patrol agents know what to do when catching and apprehending anyone illegally crossing the border.  If individuals claim asylum, they are allowed temporary entrance into the U.S. but must wait for federal immigration courts to hear their plea, often just the immigrant’s word based on personal experience without documentation such as photos and cell phone videos of rapes and gang shootings or recorded threats against their lives.  The Hondurans heading north reportedly to America have claimed their lives are in danger, meaning they would certainly be tortured and/or killed if they remained in their homeland … which is where they’d rather live, don’t you think?

Home is where the heart is

Political and religious asylum has been a human right long recognized and respected by the U.S. probably because ours is a nation of immigrants, people whose lineage is not originally from this part of the world.  The majority of us can check our family history online nowadays and find when our roots were firmly planted in the soil of America, once called the New World by Europeans of the Renaissance and Enlightenment eras.

In the digital age of the 21st century, the power in charge says Americans have had enough of foreigners migrating to our shores.  Why do they keep coming here when they know Americans will resent and suppress them?  When they know we’ll keep them poor, yell at ’em to speak English, and refuse to get to know them or help in any way other than begrudgingly with our hard-earned tax dollars?  Hmm.  Money is always the initial prejudice.

According to the U.S. budget breakdown, the biggest slice of the pie goes to support the military, then another big chunk goes to Medicare (the elderly who paid into it during their working years), and so on until finally a tiny sliver is left to assist legal immigrants with low-income housing, some foodstuffs, very basic healthcare (Medicaid) and enforced public schooling.

The poem at the foot of the Statue of Liberty had it right all along: Most immigrants who come to this country—like most of our ancestors—are poor not rich, hardly living a life of privilege off U.S. taxpayers.  And immigrants stay poor for at least one generation.  Most immigrants to this country are good conscientious people, folks just wanting to survive and yes prosper, actually begging for what they believed was a natural God-given human right to be free from persecution.  They are willing to do anything, work any job, accept the lowest wage, reside in high-crime areas, put up with taunts and jeers coming from the top of our political power structure and supported wholeheartedly by the loudest of Americans—people who’ve forgotten their heritage, their family’s journey not all that long ago.  What a shame.

To be poor and also an immigrant is to be liberal, meaning open minded to other ways of living and thinking.  Right there is the core issue irritating the heart of Americans who do not believe their tax dollars and our nation should support immigrants for any reason whatsoever.  Immigrants, legal or illegal, have never been our country’s Number One problem, likened to an infestation of cockroaches that must be exterminated.

Immigrants to America do not deserve to be kicked in the gut by steel boots and scorned with hateful rhetoric and general meanness.  And if we’re really being honest, immigrants seeking asylum, from homelands dominated by violent crazy narco governments, do not have in their numbers the thousands of native-born American rapists and criminal sociopaths who daily terrorize citizens until stopped by police.  The sociopaths of narco governments remain behind in the countries they dominate.  For life is good, why would they ever leave?

Meanwhile in New York Harbor, modern Americans can tear down the plaque at the foot of Lady Liberty or redact the poetic words once symbolizing the golden purpose of our country’s beautiful and just existence.  But those very words and the profound meaning will not be ignored or forgotten by millions of Americans and neither will our consecrated assurance in the sanctity of humanity.  We’re all just human beings down here, trying to stay alive, walking toward the light of liberty wherever we find it near or far.  Like it or not, we all are equal to each other, maybe not in the eyes of the races but in the eyes of our Creator, the One we each answer to one way or another.

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Americans created communities that hate Jews or know nothing about them

I’ve lived in Texas all my life, and there is a phrase I’ve never ever heard spoken, not by my neighbors in the Dallas suburbs and East Texas or my family from rural Oklahoma.  That phrase is “dirty Jews.”  As I think about it, I never heard anyone in school or church say the word ‘Jew’—and if so only in biblical references and with certain respect such as “Jews are God’s only chosen people” or a reminder “Jews didn’t kill Jesus; the Romans did.”  That is my background.  On the flip side, I can’t say I’ve never heard anything derogatory against blacks, Mexicans and even women but not a word of disrespect or animosity (or even acknowledgement really) about people who happen to be Jewish.

Having lived many decades now, I’ve sadly come to realize there are parts of my own country where hatred against Jews is commonly spoken in jest or contempt by mostly white people in families and communities where emotions are enraged by the thought of a Jew living next door or attending school with their Christian children.

And now after the largest massacre of Jews on U.S. soil, all of us who call ourselves American must never forget the many enclaves throughout our homeland where anti-Jewish sentiment festers and boils.  We must always be aware of those whose family and acquaintances are hostile toward Jews, wishing them dead, insisting they control the mass media, writing and talking online about their hatred of this particular group of people.

I cannot comprehend the world’s perpetual hatred of Jews, of all people, still today given their history and the Holocaust—which did occur and was proudly chronicled and methodically recorded by Germans during Hitler’s reign.  The only anti-Semite acts I recall growing up around Dallas was synagogues vandalized with swastikas, probably the work of teens, wannabe Nazis who more than likely by now have lived long enough to regret what they did.

Faster than the speed of speech

Americans have always wrestled with our constitutional right of free speech.  This is why and how we’ve come to this point in our political and social history: the internet and our insistence to leave uncensored what others say and believe, no matter how offensive, prejudiced and untrue.  Even the American Civil Liberties Union, which members include a number of Jewish people, would support the right of everyone to say whatever he or she wants, short of pranking “Fire!” in a crowded theater.  Therefore, responsible speech was the key to maintaining our free society.

But because of free speech in the Information Age, we’ve created an era of ugliness.  Those white communities throughout our nation, the ones who collectively hate Jews enough to kill them or wish them harm, have discovered a brotherhood of sorts on the internet.  White Nationalist websites are worldwide with memberships growing wildly since the dawn of the internet.  These are sites filled with jokes and sensationalized stories about blacks and every race and ethnicity on the planet, of course including Jews.  After Trump was elected president, our own crop of white Nationalists and neo-Nazis felt they could finally come out in public and proclaim their ideals, chanting in their march on Charlottesville “The Jews will not replace us!!!”

Shocking—to someone like me, raised without ever hearing an unkind sentiment against Jews.  I grew up on ’60s & ’70s TV, watching plenty of comedians comfortably make fun of their Jewish heritage, their people and the stereotypes.  In the privacy of our homes, we laughed because the comedians, actors, singers, writers and shows made us think it was all right to laugh at what was ludicrous.  No harm done because in the heart of TV land, we held no animosity toward Jews as a people or a culture.  We were entertained, never seeing a hint of sadness in those who made us smile.  We had nothing to fear from each other, audience and entertainer.

Too, we were horrified when watching movies about real-life stories during the Holocaust, of degradation and for a few survival.  We cried at depictions of a stark reality, what European Jews had to go through during Hitler’s reign.  We wept because of our shared humanity, never for a moment thinking deep resentment and hatred toward these people still exists, not all these years after the last world war.

Like the Nazis, white Nationalists are more often Christian than atheist, surely celebrating Christmas and Easter especially if they have children.  That is most incomprehensible: Christians hating Jews.  The Jews would tell us the hatred started long ago, an animosity, a tribal fear, a social and cultural jealousy that goes back in time thousands of years, way before Christ.  Jewish history is not the history of everyone else.  That is because many communities would not allow Jews as residents.  Then television and movies brought Jews right into our homes, like virtual neighbors.  Turns out, Jewish people, whether through humor or historical fact, can teach the rest of us quite a lot: about spiritual faith, common decency, empathy, justice, assimilation, wisdom, humor, cooperation, communication, and acceptance of those who hate them … and always will.