A week from today is elections day. We look forward to elections days for the wrong reasons. Instead of being excited about taking part in the voting process we are excited because it’s the end of that interminable period when our intelligence is assaulted 30 seconds at a time—all the time, it seems, on the television.
—and when our mailboxes are stuffed with mailers of questionable veracity usually provided by people without the courtesy or the courage to admit they paid for the appropriately-named junk mail.
Interestingly, at the end of the day, a lot of people will transfer from being the kind of people they campaigned against to being those people. And what will they do to correct the impressions their voters have about government?
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We have been interested in some of the reasons various groups don’t want us to vote for a new system of drawing legislative districts after the 2020 census. One side says it would be a mistake to let the state demographer (a person who spends his or her life analyzing population and population trends) draw new districts because they’ll just use statistics and will come up with districts that are more gerrymandered that some districts from the last go-around. Others worry that letting the demographer draw the districts will weaken the political power of this or that group. We must have been mistaken all these years because we thought reapportionment dealt with representation rather than power. Silly us.
Could it be that the state demographer won’t care if two legislative incumbents wind up in the same district instead of benefitting from a process that is suspected of protecting incumbents or at least their party majorities? As far as the demographer coming up with screwball districts, surely that person couldn’t do worse than the creation of the present Fifth Congressional District that I dubbed the “dead lizard” district after the last congressional redistricting (it looks like a dead lizard lying on its back with its feet in the air) that has a former Mayor of Kansas City representing a rural area as far east as Marshall.
What the heck. We can always change the constitution back to the present system if the legislative districts after the 2020 census are as bad as some interest groups forecast they will be, can’t we?
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Elections almost always have issues created by petition campaigns. It’s an important freedom we have as citizens to propose laws or to ask for a statewide vote on something the legislature did that raises questions in the minds of enough people that they want citizens to have the final say. But that freedom can carry with it unintended consequences because petitions don’t go through the refining process of legislative committee hearings, debates, votes, and compromises where possible. Of course the legislature sometimes fumbles an issue and in both cases ballot issues can be issues financially backed by a special interest if not an individual.
Voters have an often-overlooked responsibility to get out the spy glass and read all the fine print in the election legal notices. We haven’t talked to very many folks who have done that. So we get what we get and the courts often have to figure out what we got regardless of what we thought we were getting.
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The best part of election day is that all of the junk mail campaign propaganda that goes straight to our waste baskets will be replaced by Christmas catalogues. We prefer Christmas catalogs for several reasons. They don’t forecast national or international catastrophes if we buy something offered by another catalog. They usually are honest about their products (the pictures usually are more accurate than the pictures of the hamburgers at fast foot joints). We have never gotten an L. L. Bean catalogue that suggests the products in a Land’s End catalogue are dangerous to our well-being because of who wears them or because of who the wearers hang out with.
And they don’t proclaim exclusive knowledge of what our “values” are. The Vermont Country Store is filled with traditional values—soap on a rope, Adams Clove chewing gum, old-fashioned popcorn makers or hand-cranked ice-cream makers, or dresses whose styles are timeless. Coldwater Creek is for people whose values tend toward the stylish with a little “bling” thrown in. We have yet to see the Vermont Country Store catalogue that says the Coldwater Creek catalogue is too liberal to be good for us.
In short, the catalogues have a lot more things that we will buy than most of the campaign junk mail that winds up in landfills instead of recycle bins.
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Jefferson City is building a new fire station, replacing an older one in the east end of town (the building will be for sale, by the way, in case you want a unique home, assuming you can get a zoning change). News of the planned sale of the old fire house brings to mind our old friend Derry Brownfield, who used to occasionally remind us why fire engines are red:
“Because they have eight wheels and four people on them, and four plus eight is 12, and there are 12 inches in a foot, and one foot is a ruler, and Queen Elizabeth was a ruler, and Queen Elizabeth was also a ship, and the ship sailed the seas, and in the seas are fish, and fish have fins, and the Finns fought the Russians, and the Russians are red, and fire trucks are always ‘russian’ around.”
Uh-huh.
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Go vote next Tuesday. Do yourself and your state a favor and spend the next seven days with your reading glass studying all that fine print.
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