Voting

The first president I voted for was Richard Milhous Nixon. In my defense, I was young and impressionable and Nixon just oozed charisma. Or was that sweat? Anyway, I've been doing penance in the Democratic party for some time now. At that time I was a conservative, young man from a conservative household. My dad was an optometrist, for God's sake. “I'm feeling much better now” (Monty Python).

I mention this embarrassing moment to illustrate a point. Voting, or the lack of it, has consequences. The consequence, of my mental lapse in 1972, was Nixon. Of course, I didn't put Nixon in the White House all by myself. I had help from 47,168,709 co-defendants, and that was actually only 37.5% of the voting population. A little more than a third of the eligible voters in this country put the second worst president in recent memory into office. I'll let you figure out who gets my vote for number one.

Speaking of convicted sexual predators with bad comb-overs, 62,984,828 votes put Trump into office. That's only 29% of the eligible voters. That's less than a third and, incidentally, about three million less than Clinton. But that's another topic for another article.

My point is, not everyone is participating. The founders set up a system that demands participation in order to work. At the founding of this country, only white men could participate, but “we're feeling much better now” (sorry Monty). What I'm driving at is, governing is not a spectator sport. Like it or not, we have a system where we hire the folks that carry on the business of government,.and that gives us the power to decide what kind of society we live in.

I've focused on the national vote, because that's the one most people are familiar with. The reality is, the local vote has much more of an effect on your day to day, than who's in the White House or the Capital building. Your state and local leaders are the ones who decide which potholes to fill and when your street gets plowed. I don't know about you, but on any given day, being able to get to work is more important to me than whatever nonsense is going on in D.C. Your borough government, your Mayor, your school board, that's where the action is. And speaking of action, has anyone been noticing what's going on with our school board. (Notice how I did a Trumpesque free association there? Just seeing if you're paying attention.)

The Mat-Su school board has sharply curtailed the role of its student representative. It is also in the process of banning 56 undesirable books. Books your children will no longer have school access to. These aren't the obvious books like The Anarchists Cook Book or The Art of the Deal. They are: Slaughterhouse Five, The Handmaids Tail, and The Bluest Eye; all thought provoking, challenging books. Books that make you think. Books that may give you a different perspective. Some of them even go so far as to challenge authority. You know; books that authoritarians might have issues with. And, our authoritarian school board needs to hold the Billy Pilgrims and Offreds at bay.

These are the people we have put into office. These are the people who, through lack of participation , we have put in a position to have a substantial influence on the education of our children. This is the body that recently received a vote of no confidence from the employees of the district. Unfortunately, the only votes that count are the ones that put this gaggle of autocrats into office in the first place. The thing is, not all of us voted to do that. By my count, less than 93,000 people voted in the recent borough wide election. That's about 9.5% and that's not enough for this democracy thing to work well.

Decisions made by Biden or, God forbid, Trump haven't nearly the influence on your day as the people who decide what your property taxes are going to be, or what your children can read in school. And these people receive fewer votes than the flashy, sexy national races. Damn, I just called the pending Biden/Trump race sexy. I'm going to have to hose off my keyboard.

Being the soft headed, liberal optimist that I am, I firmly believe that the more participation we have in governing, the better off we are. The more voices that are heard, the more accurately we can implement the will of the people, and that's what this is supposed to be about. It's not winner take all and to hell with those who didn't vote for me. It's inclusion. It's all of us through cooperation and, another “C” word, compromise that we reach a consensus. The more people who participate in this process, the more likely that is to happen. It's actually your patriotic duty to help guide your community. So please, next time, do what needs to be done and vote. Maybe in fifty years, you too can have an embarrassing anecdote.