Let’s vote as if our lives depended on it because they do. In other words, we need to vote not just because it is our duty, but because our vote may very well determine whether we get to vote again and make it count.
During my childhood it was understood in my family that voting was something only important people did. That is in part why everyone in our camp would pass around the hat for the pennies, nickles and dimes to gather the three dollars for the poll tax that grandfather had to pay to vote.
To us, our grandfather was the most important person in our community. He was our minister, our contractor, the owner of the truck we traveled in and he was the patriarch of our extended family.
We really did not know or think that everyone could vote. After-all, voting cost a days wages and, that was a clear indication, that only important people who had the money could vote.
It is not that the family was not interested in the affairs of the country or the world. We had a keen interest in what was going on because, most of the time, we had family members in the armed forces and, most of the time, we were at war and sometimes they died.
There is a story of how my father who had three months of schooling, learned how to read in Spanish. He bought newspapers in Spanish available in the Rio Grand Valley of Texas and worked a long time to piece the words syllable by syllable until he could read.
It was World War II and he needed to know how our country was doing. There was another time later when we had just arrived in Sterling, Colorado, that the battery of our 49 Chrysler went dead because he was listening to radio reports of the presidential vote between Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson until the former was elected President.
Our national history has taken us to a point that jeopardizes the very nature of our democratic system beginning with the vote of the people. One of our two major political parties that has been captured by Donald Trump and the forces of autocracy.
The Republican Party organized in 1854 on an anti-slavery platform was joined by several other parties to become a rival of the Democratic Party and its states rights and pro-slavery stance. It is the Republicans that led the fight in the Civil War against the South to achieve a successful conclusion.
One hundred and eighteen years later however, the Republican Party managed a 180 degree turn as part some- thing called the “Southern Strategy” created by President Nixon’s 1972 campaign that convinced ex-Confederates states to become Republican. Since then regional pre-Civil War aspirations have come to life and are further fed by racial fears of MAGA and others about losing their majority status.
The fear and a Southern pre-Civil War allusion that promises control at any cost has sent the Republican Party into an anti-democratic spiral that feeds the designs of people like Trump. That scenario has to be countered by concerned Americans and their belief in the Constitution and the importance of democratic institutions that are there to protect our freedom.`
As we enter the national political season, it is important that every American feel empowered to make major decisions about preserving our way of life and extending opportunities to construct a greater America. The effort to make this a reality begins at the ballot box.
The views expressed by David Conde are not necessarily the views of laVozColorado. Comments and responses may be directed to News@lavozcolorado.com.
