Get up off your butt and vote!
If you haven’t listened to McCain, if you haven’t listened to Obama, if you haven’t voted, listen to four year-old Truett — the kids speaks the truth!
Tip of the old scrub brush to Jack Keady and all the people who keep all of our airplanes flying.
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Citizenship, Elections, Politics | Tagged: Citizenship, Cute Kid, election, Politics, voting | 
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Posted by Ed Darrell
Who said this?
Yet even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes. Well, I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America — there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America. The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into Red States and Blue States; Red States for Republicans, Blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the Blue States, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the Red States. We coach Little League in the Blue States and have gay friends in the Red States. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and patriots who supported it. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.
In the end, that’s what this election is about. Do we participate in a politics of cynicism or a politics of hope? John Kerry calls on us to hope. John Edwards calls on us to hope. I’m not talking about blind optimism here — the almost willful ignorance that thinks unemployment will go away if we just don’t talk about it, or the health care crisis will solve itself if we just ignore it. No, I’m talking about something more substantial. It’s the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs; the hope of immigrants setting out for distant shores; the hope of a young naval lieutenant bravely patrolling the Mekong Delta; the hope of a mill worker’s son who dares to defy the odds; the hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too. The audacity of hope!
In the end, that is God’s greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation; the belief in things not seen; the belief that there are better days ahead.
I could vote for a guy who said that.
3 Comments | Barack Obama, Elections, History, Politics | Tagged: Barack Obama, Campaign 2008, Elections, History, hope, Politics, voting | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Ms. Cornelius at A Shrewdness of Apes nails things down again. Tip of the old scrub brush, with extra bubbles, to JD2718.
My father tended to vote Republican, too. For the first nine years of my life he remained a small business owner, in Burley, Idaho. When the workers at J. R. Simplot went out on strike one November (1961 as I recall, but I was a child), it doomed several furniture stores in and around Cassia County, and my parents’ was just one. For the rest of my life my father worked for other people, until he retired.
Still he voted Republican. He even had a union card, from the old plumbers and pipefitters union in Los Angeles, from when he worked on Liberty Ships during World War II. I never could figure it.
I do recall the stern lecture I got when I went to the Democrats’ mass meeting my first election, and then when I got elected as a delegate for McGovern and — the only one in my town, as I recall — I put up the McGovern bumpersticker (McGovern finished third in parts of Utah County, behind the American Party candidate). My father told me that no one in the family had ever voted Democratic before.
It was a great comic scene, somthing right out of Woody Allen. My father lecturing me about how voting Republican was rather a family duty, with my mother behind him shaking her head “no,” and mouthing “Don’t believe him. Not true. No.”
The only president I ever smuggled him in to see was Jimmy Carter. Carter showed up in Salt Lake City, and spoke in the Latter-day Saints’ Tabernacle on Temple Square, as I recall. I wangled the tickets, got Dad there and sat with him. Better than Christmas. Almost as good as when we watched Henry Mancini from nearly the same seats.
I don’t really know how my father would vote in this election, though. He was nervous about the civil rights campaigns, about Martin Luther King, Jr. He’d tell the stories about why he had problems with unions, about how the unions kept him from promoting African Americans he’d hire at United Cigar Stores in Los Angeles (before the Liberty Ship gig). And he’d say that he wouldn’t have any problem voting for a black man who had a history of accomplishment in areas outside of civil rights, too. He said he could vote for a black man from Harvard, someone who had the educational background of Kennedy, though he voted for Nixon against Kennedy (and Nixon twice more). Barack Obama might be the guy my father would have voted for.
Life sometimes imitates Thomas Kuhn’s observations about scientific revolutions. Sometimes the children have to go vote the interests of the parents, especially when the parents don’t, or won’t.
My father voted against Lyndon Johnson, too — twice. Johnson’s reforms of Social Security, designed to keep American senior citizens out of the county poor houses, kept my father out of poverty after he finally retired (at 75? 77?). The Republican businessmen he’d put his faith in managed to squander the pension funds he might have had, or cheat him out of the share of the business that would have kept him from having to rely on Social Security. My father put his faith in Republicans, but Lyndon Johnson rescued him.
I don’t know this “Joe the plumber.” I knew my father, the former plumber and pipefitter, the erstwhile small business owner, the man who worked from the time he was 14 to help his family get enough education to get out of poverty, first his sisters in college, then his own family. He never made enough to benefit from tax cuts for the rich. My father was real, and deserved better.
1 Comment | Barack Obama, Campaigns, Family, History, Labor and unions, Politics, unions | Tagged: Fathers, History, Obama, Politics, Social Security, Tax Cuts, unions, voting | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Rick Noriega is a rising star, a good man who has served his nation and state well, in Iraq, in the Texas legislature, and now — he hopes — in the U.S. Senate.
Early voting opened this morning in Texas. Record turnouts reported from Dallas County. It’s an important election, and not too late to donate to the candidate of your choice and/or volunteer to canvass.
Leave a Comment » | Democracy, Democracy in action, History, Iraq, Politics, Texas, U.S. Senate | Tagged: Democracy, History, Iraq, Politics, Rick Noriega, Texas, U.S. Senate, voting | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
“Paul Revere” at Effects Measure muses on the effect of one vote in the grand scheme of things, and comes up wondering whether it wouldn’t be a good idea to require voters to vote — as indeed is done in Australia (voters pay a fine for failing to vote).
It’s a good discussion of the impact one citizen’s vote really makes, a discussion leavened by the science background of Revere. The article would make a wonderful warm-up exercise for classes in civics, government, economics and U.S. history.
Voting is a privilege, but it’s also a duty of good citizenship. Should we require people to vote, by law, with criminal penalties for those who fail to make a choice at the polls?
What do you think?
3 Comments | Bell Ringers, Citizenship, Civil Rights, Economics, Government, Voting Rights Act, Warm-up exercises | Tagged: Citizenship, Elections, Government, Politics, voting | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Ed Darrell on Texas's Colorado River
Come on in, the water's fine. Come often: Cleanliness is next to godliness.
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 