Doda qu panga, doda qu shala, doda qu panga, u kala sha ti.
When you feel like the whole world is spinning off it's axis, there should be two things that you can count on to remain safe ground....sports and weather. But, it is October in Louisiana, it's still 95 degrees out during the day and you just can't count on the calendar as sanctuary from our increasingly maddening human condition.
Tonight there will be a football game between the Bears and the Panthers. Typical high school fare except this game is being held on a rare Thursday evening. Having lived too long in Louisiana, I have no real perspective on the rest of the country save what I see on television or read in the papers; but, just like the cultural phenomenon portrayed in "Friday Night Lights", Louisiana takes it's high school football just as seriously as George Bush's beloved Texas.
Perhaps even more so, after all they have supplanted the hallowed tradition of Friday night football in observance of the other fall religion, squirrel season.
There is nothing particularly cosmopolitan about Alexandria or Rapides Parish, the home of the Bears. But, agri-rural Grant Parish, home of the Panthers is a sub-culture all unto itself. The "big game" tonight is a battle of the titans...two 0-5 powerhouses of football prowess. There may be a good turnout for the game, but everyone in the Panther stands will only be thinking of Friday and dreaming of Saturday morning. Friday is a half school day for the Panthers, but that is not all that makes the day special. Student "Panthers" can wear camouflage on "Squirrel" Friday and ride their horses to the half-day of school. Then, they can ride their horses home at noon to join the other menfolk in the family to go to squirrel camp.
Opening day of squirrel season which is the first Saturday in October is like a religious rite of passage. It all starts Friday night with the pilgrimage to your hunting camp to eat, drink, fart and be manly. Four-wheelers will be revved, Jack Daniels consumed and fartsacks (sleeping bags) slept in. You have to be in the woods before sun-up. Such are the joys of squirrel season.
Sometimes it is not just football and squirrel season that collide...in year's past, hurricanes and elections have mixed it up with our two competing religions. Until 2002, the first Saturday in October was also Louisiana's primary election weekend, but that year the forces of nature, politics and squirrel camp collided with unprecedented results. On the ballot locally was a half-cent tax initiative to increasing funding the Rapides Parish Sheriff's department. A media campaign of extreme manipulation, fear and loathing evoking images of the Columbine massacre was used to stimulate the voters under the auspices of protecting children at school from trench coat wearing terrorists and putting more deputies on street patrol.
Statewide, there were also constitutional amendments protecting state resident's gun ownership and the retail trade in ammunition, a reaction to 9-11. The hunter's who were inclined to vote in support of any gun and cop legislation, all filed absentee-early voter ballots. Then, Hurricane Lilly blew in Friday night and wreaked havoc on southwest and central Louisiana. The secretary of state had been lulled into a false sense of security and the Saturday morning election was allowed to stand. Turnout in the affected areas of the state was under 10% including the absentee voting. There was quite an uproar over the results, or rather the manner that it was ram-rodded under those conditions and ever since, the primary elections are held the last weekend in September.
This year's primary was last weekend and marked rural Rapides Parish's first foray into the wild and wooly world of electronic voting. In our district, there were no intra-party congressional primaries, so the issues on the ballot were local school and library taxes, statewide insurance commissioner race and the thinning of the herd for the replacement of our secretary of state. The real kicker were the thirteen (13, yikes) constitutional amendments most of which were in reaction to the devastation wrought by last year's hurricane season. All of them passed which is remarkable given that the legislature after two special sessions and one full regular session were not able to get much of anything accomplished. Unfortunately, four of the amendments had serious errors in the language which make them basically the opposite of what the legislative intent was. Not highly unusual, but in these particular cases will cause a constitutional crisis in the state and result in many lawsuits, if not reconciled quickly. I expect that the legislature will have to hold an extraordinary constitutional convention to rehash the whole works which is the only way they can circumvent the "will of the people". It doesn't matter that they were responsible for the poor language.
As far as the e-voting goes, the voter does not get a receipt when casting their vote; however, there is an LED display that is separate from the touch-board (it is not LED or LCD, it is more mechanical) that shows what the current voting item is registered as, so as you step through each race or amendment it would show the result for the last completed item. I miss the good old pull levers already. I was trying to be as observational as I could be in the short three (3) minutes that we were allowed in the booth, but I was distracted by one of the other voters telling one of the commissioners a nigger joke. It really bummed me out...we have so far yet to go. I did notice that the e-machines have paper receipts for the master tally in addition to their on-board memory.
So here I am, five weeks into the cotton harvest with a persistent defoliant headache, bemoaning the heat and nigger jokes and bad amendment language, constitutional crises waiting to poke up their ugly head and we haven't even gotten to the national news. I guess it is best to leave that bit of ugliness alone for now.
I'll wake on Saturday morning to the sounds of gunshots and four-wheelers knowing that there are things in life that are best left alone. Just because you own a GPS and haven't lost your bearings, doesn't mean you are not lost. On this particular Saturday morning with the haze of squirrel camp Friday night still hanging low like a fog, there will be Jack Daniels and his friends tromping with shotguns through the drought-dry leaves telling racist jokes. It is best to stay out of the woods.
Doda qu panga, doda qu shala, doda qu panga, u kala sha ti.
Swahili for "man gone crazy, man lost in the woods"