Remember that Martian who landed on the lawn of Our Nation's
Capitol in my previous blog ("Some SCOTUS Photos," March 27, 2012)? The one who noticed that the people with dark skin
were rallying for something different than the ones with the light skin wanted?
He asked me about other important features of our Western
civilization that concern me. He said that on his planet people have every skin
color imaginable, like the Muppets, and there is no discrimination on that
basis.
I did not think to ask him if there were other bases for
Martian discrimination.
I told him about the shrinking electorate and all those
people, including bribed Democrats, who are working to disenfranchise underprivileged
minorities. That those controlling this process represent a minute fraction of
our population doesn't seem to make a difference.
I wondered what perspective he might lend to this atrocity.
He said that it seemed to him as though those holding the
strings of our society want to pull us back to another era when only a few
people had the vote.
One such era, it occurred to me, was at the dawn of our
nation's history, when only rich people, with light skin, were allowed to
vote--"rich" in this case meaning those with property, even an ass, as Ben
Franklin liked to joke.
But this situation did not last long. Soon all taxpayers
acquired the right to vote; then veterans, then immigrants, and then even
former slaves, people with dark skin.
Then, when women began to agitate for this right, things
started going downhill, despite the Fifteenth Amendment and even the Nineteenth
Amendment, which took a while to come about thereafter.
So that the vote extended to the largest variety of people a
bit past the middle of the nineteenth century, as the industrial age began to
supplant the agrarian age.
The most varieties of people, and perhaps a higher
percentage of the people, but I can't promise this.
What I can say with confidence is that there is a larger
variety of ways to disenfranchise people in this country these days than there
are varieties to discriminate against, and that's saying a lot, because there
is such a multitude of nationalities and ethnicities who have arrived here
recently, reaching for the good life depicted in reruns of old TV shows and old
Hollywood movies that get passed around all over the world, even to people
living under Stone Age circumstances in SubSaharan Africa.
iPods and iPads have come there, too. Their Stone Age really
rocks [bad pun].
*****
"If only rich people vote, then only rich people will be in
office," noted my green friend. "What will happen to everybody else? They'd be
treated better on Mars, where there is no such thing as rich or poor. Every
year we put all of our possessions together and split them up with complete
parity, blindfolded. No one ever heard of money."
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).