Month: April 2024

I love a good protest, have spent a bit of my recent adult years joining causes I wholeheartedly believe in like gun control and women’s rights. But … I’m not so quick to join today’s college protest. I’m for a free Palestine yet won’t chant against Jewish students and Israel.

Maybe it’s a generation gap. If the protestors were shouting “End the Gaza War NOW,” I’d be right there with ’em. But if I’m hearing and reading and seeing them right, the purpose of all those somewhat organized protests on college campuses now spanning the U.S. are vehemently anti-Israel, anti-Jew and pro-Palestine only.

None of the college youth is shouting END WAR NOW. NO MORE WAR. That was a main feature of the anti-Vietnam War protests on colleges in the 1960s. Young men were being drafted into an endless war. Then the draft ended, and so did college protests. It took years for peace on campus to happen, but college life was, as the young kids would say, “boring” by the mid ’70s.

Yes, enough of the bloodshed and carnage and complete annihilation of the Gaza Strip. I agree. Tens of thousands of Palestinians, the great majority innocent women and children, are now dead, killed by Israeli military. And Israel isn’t stopping yet.

In fact, the U.S. college protests always make me think one thing: why Israel went to war with Hamas to begin with. There was no reason for Hamas to attack, capture, rape, burn and kill mostly women and young females in a barbaric act they proudly displayed online October 7, 2023.

And it seems young people of college age aren’t up on world history. Because of the Jewish Holocaust by the German Nazis of the 1930s and ’40s, Israelis are more than willing to go to war with any nation or terrorist group that comes calling.

Hamas came calling.

And Israel is kicking their ass.

Free the hostages already!

Why is no one replying to the pleas to stop the war by first telling Hamas: “Return the hostages, and all this stops right now?”

Rumor is the Israeli hostages along with a few Americans, held in God-knows where underground, are dead. Hamas recently set free a 4-year-old girl for some unknown reason. Where’s all the others?

Instead of backing out of the war they started, Hamas is proposing Israel first return thousands of their people captured or imprisoned by Israel for a few dozen hostages from Hamas’ October terrorist rape and death storm.

And way over here at U.S. universities, which are specifically sought after by families abroad with means including those in Arab nations, students have shouted vehemently for the destruction of Israel. No more Israel. Like that is gonna happen. Listen, kids, the world will never let that happen.

Political talking heads have tried to theorize the college anti-Jew protests, saying the world’s young people today simply have no knowledge of world history, the reason why Israel was established in 1948 – by world order. The history is the teeny tiny area that is now Israel (all of it, mind you, sans oil) has done nothing but cause an evil hate to spread yea all these many decades. But in truth, hate for the Jews goes way back many centuries to ancient times. In the Middle East, people hate Jews like whites in America hate Blacks. But in America, laws were established to ensure the races live together. Racially integrated schools taught us how to get along. Racial hatred still exists today in the U.S., but it’s a helluva lot less bitter and murderous as it was a century ago.

What will it take for Israel and Hamas to proclaim peace? Israel states peace can never be achieved as long as a terrorist organization maintains its ultimate goal is to erase Israel off the map.

So, Israel and Hamas feel the need to totally destroy each other. That premise hasn’t changed for Hamas or Israel.

War is stupid and always unnecessary in the eyes and minds of the naïve. And that is the adjective of youth today and yesterday. For grown-ups, war is almost always a last resort, a forced and costly no-good situation, unpopular by at least half the masses, but a necessary evil when the alternative is annihilation of a whole nation and people who in this case happen to be Jews.

What kind of idiot would have a problem with mail-in ballots for voting? Answer: American idiots. A Facebook meme listed countries that do not permit mail-in ballots in their elections—promoted like this is a good thing the U.S. should ban, too. Two countries that struck me as odd to include, if’n you wanna ban mail-in ballots, were Russia and war-torn Ukraine. What kinda idiot would tout Russia as a government we should emulate? My bet is someone who doesn’t remember American high school during the Cold War. Back then we were told, correctly, that the USSR held sham elections. And all these years later, the long-time Russian leader, who hails from the notorious if not pure evil KGB and laments the breakup of his dear USSR and losing the bleak and dreary Eastern Bloc nations it suppressed like a steel boot pressed tightly over the people’s throats, maintains nothing but sham elections especially when he’s on the ballot.

Other countries that indeed do not allow absentee voting, which would include mail-in ballots, are: Scandinavia, almost all the former Soviet Eastern Bloc nations now relishing Western politics and freedom, and some European nations like France, Portugal, Belgium and Italy, also Greece and Turkey.

Nations that allow mail-in voting alongside the USA include Great Britain, Germany, Poland, Iceland and Spain.

But over here, because former President Trump lied about mail-in ballots as a possible means of corrupting the national election, half the country believes it and wants it banned.

To them, I offer one word: disability.

And a second word: lawsuit.

What separates the U.S. from all the other nations on earth? Our inherent ‘right’ to sue anyone anywhere anytime for any reason. Psst. That’s how the Americans with Disabilities Act came to pass as law of the land. Someone sued, at the time for not being able to park his car close to a shopping center’s front door when he was paralyzed and could not walk from the parking lot.

Hindsight is blind

Remember when we thought we had only one day to vote every four years for President of the United States? And tough taters if you had to work, bub. Actually, early voting has been provided since our country’s founding.

I’ve voted since 1980 and have never heard of voter fraud—not in this country. A lot of it went on in banana republics south of the border.

I also remember our country having a problem with low voter turnout in elections. And that was a national disgrace that became a big concern to fix in the 1990s.

So to get more people to vote, to participate in our democracy that we’re trying to maintain here in the U.S., all kinds of conveniences were created or touted—again, not to create illegal voting (because hardly any Americans were going through the trouble of voting anyway—the problem was apathy not ballot stealing or voter fraud). The election goal was to provide opportunities for every eligible American citizen to cast a ballot and exercise the right to vote.

These measures included—within a certain timeframe—expanding mail-in ballots (generally, for people over 65, the disabled, pregnant, imprisoned, and even people who are overseas yet maintain U.S. citizenship like those in the military). And nowadays many states opt for no-excuse-necessary for a registered voter to receive an early ballot. Election officials think it’s still a good thing. Another convenience highly touted was early voting in person. Polls were open every day for two weeks or so whereby any registered voter could cast a ballot generally from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. This is the norm today.

There have been other helpful goings-on that apparently American soreheads perceive as an imagined potential problem, such as political party workers picking up voters living in certain neighborhoods to deliver them to the polls. You know, in this country your vote is still private. NO ONE WILL KNOW WHO YOU VOTED FOR, not unless you tell. You have no obligation to vote for anyone a transportation driver endorses.

American elections, when you really think about them or return to our nation’s history instead of chasing internet white rabbit holes into conspiracy theories, are sacred. I don’t know if other nations see voting as something spiritually relevant or uplifting.  

As for Americans with disabilities, that is and always will be a growing and equal-opportunity segment of our population. Any of us could join them, whether temporarily like a broken leg or cancer treatments and no ability to stand in person at a voting line or permanently like loss of limbs, sight, or hearing.

I’ll leave voter registration (Aha! Our nation and every single community in it has always maintained a way to keep tabs on all legal voters after all.) including determining who is eligible and ineligible to vote by mail to our thousands of duly elected county clerks. Psst. They handle every single election local, state and national. And for the know-nothings out there, like a former U.S. President who when running for the office in 2020 had voted only once in his life and otherwise was not a registered voter, county clerks take an oath to uphold all election laws and are well aware they risk prison if allowing anyone to vote who is not in truth eligible. That goes for the staff down at the county clerk’s office, too. The FBI also monitors voter fraud. What kinda idiot would have a problem with the FBI? Never mind.