The RED verticals are Presidential Election years. Image courtesy www.FairVote.org
Yes, there is silver lining in this monumental shitshow now playing out across the nation. Turn on the news tonight. See all of those people out in the streets protesting against the election of Donald Trump?
Those of us who who have been working Get Out the Vote (GOTV) actions in our daily lives for years and years? All of the people who gave of their time and spent hours or days or weeks canvassing and phone banking for Democrats during our primaries and general elections all of these years?
THOSE are the people who should have responded to all of our GOTV efforts and gone to the polls yesterday (or better yet, voted early) — and maybe some of them DID vote in this election, and in other elections.
But not nearly enough of them, because in the world’s oldest living democratic Republic, for the entire last century, the voting public in the Great American Experiment in democracy has NEVER broken 65% participation.
Never once in a 100 years.
Here is another version of a Voter Participation graph.
This one covers the years 1789 — 2014.
LOOK at how important voting was to the people of America from 1835 — 1900, they were voting at 70% to 80% for over a half century.
Perhaps, being so much closer in time to the American Revolution, close enough to hear the stories of it from elderly grandparents or great-grandparents, they understood more clearly the power of their Vote?
Those earlier Americans clearly understood the Power of their Vote and exercised it regularly.
Our nation has become a nation of lazy citizens who have taken their Right to Vote, to participate in their government as something to be ignored for the most part.
If there is someone in your life who pesters you to vote every year? Donald Trump was the reason why. Because that person knew that sooner or later the increasingly uninformed citizens of the United States, who gave them every excuse under the sun for why they didn’t vote
- I didn’t have time
- I had to work
- I didn’t have a baby sitter
- I was sick
- I didn’t have transportation
- I didn’t have my Voter’s card
- I lost my ballot
- I forgot
These dedicated GOTV agitators KNEW that someday we would end up with a Donald Trump or someone like him, in the Office of the most powerful person in the entire World.
Let me repeat that — the most powerful person in the HISTORY of the human race, with the ability to launch Wars across oceans or order the firing of nuclear weapons.
This is why we harangue everyone we know to vote, every fucking year. Year after year after year. We never give up trying to get even ONE more person registered and voting.
Because we have always known just how damned important it is, to the security of our Nation and the safety of the entire world.
So where is the silver lining in this clusterfuck of an election of a self-identified misogynist and demeanor of persons of color and immigrants to the highest Office in the Land?
AFTER THIS MAYBE YOU WILL START LISTENING when we ask if you are registered to vote, when we ask if you have filled out your ballot yet, if you have a Plan for Election Day.
AFTER THIS MAYBE YOU WILL START emulating us and become a GOTV maven your own self. Spreading the word to your own family and circle of friends and acquaintances of the need to Register and Vote in every election.
I’ve spent every year of my life since I was about 25 speaking to every single person I ever meet about politics and voting and why it is essential. Ask my two adult children and their other family and friends — all of whom have (sometimes impatiently) listened to me drone on about voting and the candidates and the next upcoming election. I didn’t spend what amounts to probably six months of my life engaging complete strangers in grocery stores about politics and voting (to the utter and complete horror of my then teenage daughters) because it’s fun.
I’ve done it because I love my country with a deep and abiding passion, and I have always known that even though the wider world hears how the wealthy own everything and the Media is corrupt and corporate and how voting is a waste of time that none of that was true.
In our nation, where the mighty Serve in the Halls of Power in our Capitol city at the discretion of the least powerful among us via the ballot box, the true power in our society lies not in the bank vaults or the spacious and expansive homes of the wealthy — but in the ink in the pen in the hands of the Americans who exercise their Franchise and vote in each election.
It sounds lofty and high-minded put like that, but it nothing but the plain and unvarnished truth.
These words drove a handful of people with the desire to live a life of Freedom from tyranny onto the battlefields, risking their life and treasure to seize the chance to bequeath unto their descendants the opportunity to live as they would, free from the chains of Aristocracy and Wealth in a land of like-minded Americans…
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
and once they won their liberty, the wordsmiths among them like James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, wrote these words which have rung like a mighty bell down the centuries…
We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
This is the land our forefathers created out of whole cloth (and with slave labor, including the erection of the White House itself) and which they left in our care, as Benjamin Franklin is famously noted to have said, “A Republic, Madame, if you can keep it.”
So let us not let this great and grand moment, won at the cost of the next four years which promise to be terrible and dire for the most vulnerable among us, go to waste.
A few short weeks ago this was the general Media take on the then upcoming election and we were fucking CHEERING and congratulating ourselves on the upcoming END of the Republican Party and the ushering in of a new American Era with Madame President and an overwhelmingly more Democratic Congress:
It wasn’t just DailyKos Election projections, either. For the past 24 hours Media and TV talking head have been repeating their mea culpas endlessly and trying desperately to find a way to explain HOW THEY GOT IT SO WRONG.
But I have news for them.
That is the exact wrong thing to do. It doesn’t matter why they got the projected vote so wrong. That election is over.
What matters is what we, as the voting Citizens of America, do going forward.
What do we take from this election and use to better our nation, and the elections to come?
For the Democratic Party, I see a clear and present opportunity, a ONCE IN A LIFETIME OPPORTUNITY to create from the ashes of this devastating loss in the 2016 election of Democrats in state after state something of great value.
Go out into your day tomorrow and the days which follow and carry this message to your family and friends and acquaintances who are stunned by the surprising (to them) election of Donald Trump to the presidency AND BRING UP THE ISSUE OF REGISTERING AND VOTING.
Tell them that you understand (even if you don’t) that they haven’t been voting because of their very busy lives, but remind them to not forget this election ever again, to let it remind them every year after this WHAT HAPPENS WHEN ONLY 1 OUT OF 3 PEOPLE CAN BE BOTHERED TO VOTE.
We get a President Tiny Grabby Hands who has those tiny grabby hands on the goddamned button to launch Wars and Nuclear weapons.
Tell them we need them to elect better people.
Tell them to go look in the bedrooms of their sleeping children tonight and remember the deep and abiding love they felt the first time they ever saw them — and how their lives can be destroyed with the wrong person in the Oval Office and the seats of power in Congress and in our Statehouses.
Tell them to remember who holds the Real Power in America in their hands — and tell them to stop pretending that they aren’t part of the solution. Because they are. Each and every one of them.
Tell them if they were energized by the words of Bernie Sanders last year, when he spoke out about the dire straits of our young people indebted for life just to get an education to reach for a better life and the needs of the regular Joes and Janes for a decent paying job to support their familes — tell them to remember that each year and to use that memory to help remind themselves of why they need to get out and vote. Every election.
Tell them if they heard the words of Hillary Clinton this summer about the power of Love to defeat Hate and watched those videos of Flash Mobs in Pantsuits over and over and over — to use those memories to remind them that voting is not just something to do when you aren’t busy doing other more important things, but to do because IT is the most important thing. Every election.
Because if you all do that, now, while there are huge crowds of people out in the streets marching and singing because they are unwilling to accept that Donald J Trump has become our next President? You’ll help turn this unmitigated disaster of epic and historic proportions into something good and useful…
you could help push the Voter Participation Rate in America in 2018 up somewhere above that 65% line for the first time in over a century. Maybe as high as the voter participation rates not seen in America in five generations, since the early 19th century, to 80%.
Because if we use this terrible, horrible, no good moment in time to Change the Way Americans see the act of voting from an annoyance to a DUTY?
We could actually do something that hasn’t been seen in America since the days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt after he and a Democratic Congress SAVED America from the Great Depression and strode out into the world and saved Europe from Hitler and the Nazis.
We could sweep the 2018 elections and drive the fucking insane Republicans from office, from the Capitol Building to your local Mayor’s office. We could turn the direction of this country from a backward, navel-gazing for a past which never really existed and which is impossible to create in this era into one which is facing the Undiscovered Country of the Future with clear eyes and a bright burning desire to achieve great things, to combat the effects of Global Climate Change, to create a society more accepting of the value of diversity in our people, to foster genuine care and love for our fellow human beings no matter their origins, to value more deeply the lives of each and every one of their fellow citizens and immigrants alike.
Do all of this and be all of this to be a part of the enduring American story of creating a More perfect Union, seeking more and better Justice for every one of our brothers and sisters regardless of the color of their skin, and promote the very real Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity.
Because if you won’t do it now — when in god’s name will you be willing to step up and become a part of that better future we teach our children is their birthright as Americans?
All I know for sure on this dark and weary night is that I intend to be good, to do good, because it’s the calling of my life to leave this world a better place than I found it.
Will you join me?
