All posts by Gary C. Woodward

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Another ‘High Theft’ Item to Protect

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We can’t say we haven’t been warned. Every voter in both parties needs to guard their franchise as much as they guard their bank accounts.

It is easy to be shocked by how many thoughtless political activists are willing to disenfranchise their fellow citizens. Taking another person’s legitimate vote is an affront to the idea of democracy. It was true years ago when Georgia Democrats set out to defeat Jimmy Carter during his first ran for the Georgia State Senate. And it now appears that every election features activists, mostly on the insurrectionist right, who would be only too happy to ignore the votes of some. Their pretext is always on some phantom vote irregularities: the alleged offenders voted by mail too late, their precinct was improperly staffed, or they were not registered with the right name or address. As reviews of the 2020 vote demonstrated, Americans can run very clean elections. The few irregularities that do occur are almost always small mistakes or voting machine glitches, not designs to steal an election.

So why the worry? We can’t forget the 147 members of Congress in 2020 tried to toss out the millions of votes in states that did not produce the presidential result they wanted.  It was as audacious a move as the simple-minded statement from Donald Trump that ‘if he lost the election, it was rigged.’ Most eight-year-olds can see through the fallacy of this false “if/then” logic. Luckily, the vote certification that correctly awarded President Biden a win was saved by folks on both sides of the isle–including Vice President Pence–who valued the voting system over disruption by others. More recently, it is alarming to learn that Ginni Thomas, the wife of the Supreme Court Justice, sought to persuade election officials in Arizona to overturn their Presidential tally. Given the Court’s potentially crucial role in an election, as happened with Bush vs Gore in 2000, her move displays a disturbing lack of character.

Attempts to disqualify ballots have become an accepted mode of changing an election result that is not to someone’s liking.

We can’t say we haven’t been warned. Every voter in both parties needs to guard their right to participate as much as they guard their bank accounts. The audacity of previous attempts took many of us by surprise. But it has become a fact that parties and groups awash in unregulated money will bankroll dubious legal help searching for reasons to throw out legitimate ballots. Using the example of a purposefully disruptive Trump, attempts to disqualify ballots have become a common way to challenge any election result that is not to someone’s liking.

Americans can continue to have faith in the integrity of poll workers and the election officials that administer the voting process. These county officials usually take pride in being professionals. And precinct volunteers mostly want to be helpful to neighbors of both parties. Instead, we need to worry about self-styled kingmakers who may try to game the process for a win-at-any-cost.  In particular, curbs on mail-in voting, precinct relocations and other dubious “improvements” seem designed to discourage minority and low income voters.

In short, guard your vote as you would the hard-earned cash that you are careful to protect.

Voting is regulated by the states.  But there are a few simple guidelines to follow. Call your country elections office if you need to indicate a change of address or any other change in status. Do this at least 30 days before an election.  And follow local county guidelines exactly for mail-in ballots, making sure you are registered with your exact name and address. There are also various web sites that easily allow you can check in advance to make sure this information in recorded. A good place to start is

https://www.vote.org/am-i-registered-to-vote/

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The Sentimental Appeal of Live Rounds

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                                            Death of Tecumseh, Part of the Frieze in the US Capitol Rotunda

The man with a gun is a familiar American stereotype. Guns are enshrined in our history, art, and even laudatory self-definitions.

A lot of our friends around the world must wonder why we Americans are so willing to tolerate the murder of innocents brought down by private arsenals of weapons. Many warn their citizens about the risk of getting shot while visiting the United States. The nation is awash in guns that would never be used for authentic hunting. Yet, we continue to invoke a “personal freedom” and a misreading of the badly-written Second Amendment to mitigate our own cognitive dissonance. As we like to point out, our national history was secured by people willing to look down the barrel of a rifle.

More than most nations, the U.S. has been defined by lethal firearms kept by ordinary citizens: muskets in the revolutionary war, rifles during the western expansion that ostensibly “tamed” the prairies and its native populations, and military arms from the “arsenal of democracy” that now serve a useful purpose in Ukraine. But as sure as darkness follows day, we must add the private armories of citizens frightened of sharing the culture with those of a different hue. Virulent nativism is again rampant in the United States, and legally purchased pistols and automatic weapons regularly show up in the hands of recluses in Buffalo, Pittsburgh or Las Vegas, most festering with conspiracy fears.

As a child of the west, it was my birthright to have a toy six shooter by the age of 6 and a BB gun soon after. By the time I was in the Scouts, I and my peers were routinely sent to the shooting range for lessons with the NRA on how to handle a rifle. Even Disney reminded us that every homestead needed the protection of a good man like Davy Crockett, who could shoot straight and protect lands that needed to be “settled.”  The cycle for many young men is now completed with gun shows, shooter games and live or filmed war reenactments. Those without the benefit of the communication skills that come with social intelligence are especially primed to game their way to the idea of a  quick “solution” to perceived grievances.

Too many take comfort in the American catechism of the “right to bear arms.”

The man with a gun is a familiar American stereotype. Guns are enshrined in our history, art, and even laudatory stories we tell about ourselves. We can see it in the monumental frieze ringing the Capitol Rotunda (above), in all of the video cowboys of the 50s and 60s and modern versions of the same genre. The film character Alec Baldwin was portraying in the ill-fated Rust aimed for show but killed for real. That accident repels, but—given the American narrative—never quite enough to unseat the attractions of yet another story about the wild west.

If we could think of our society as a person, we might imagine it as suffering from an incurable addiction to mostly sentimental narratives stitched around a misunderstood foundational document. This addiction is fed by stories of shooters and redeeming enforcers, but none of the fiction can match the horror of 211 American mass shootings so far this year.1 So, we mourn the children and adults bleeding out on the floors of schools, stores, and churches.  And we muster anger at the rare, lethal and deranged Americans that see a gun as a tool of self-expression. The bad guys in other modern societies like Norway or the U.K. are mostly captured by unarmed police. But in our stand-your-ground culture, criminals–and those among us who anticipate that they might be their victims–are armed to the teeth. The local bait shop in our affluent nearby town of 500 not only sells fishing supplies, also Glocks and ammo as well.

Addictions are notoriously difficult to break. And in our media we continue to celebrate the history and lore that is constructed about the nation’s many violent conflicts. They have become a buffer against accepting that our addiction to the bullet is any more serious than other human frailties. Even against the wishes of many Americans, we don’t seem to have the political will to disarm. So our recidivism is guaranteed.

A large segment of the political class has learned to look away, or to recite the familiar litany of prayers for the innocents on one day, while some return to stoked-up racial fears the next. Even though too many have lost their birthright freedom to live, most of the rest of us still take comfort in the tired catechism of the “real” freedom in the “right to bear arms.”

Most cultures would not tolerate a policy or cultural routine that enables the massacre of its citizens. But it seems that we have our reasons.

1 Gun Violence Archive, https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/reports/mass-shooting, Accessed May 18, 2022.