People Can Be Jerks

There’s a lot of creative thinking happening right now about how to make voting harder for people who don’t have a lot of money.Here in Oxford, North Carolina, for example, my friend Kathleen told me the traditional downtown polling place is being moved five miles away—and across a major highway.

Because apparently democracy now comes with an obstacle course.

If your strategy for building a better country is making it harder for people who aren’t like you to vote, that says something about you. To be fair, this is Republican-led—and when the Democrats were in power, they did the same thing. No party gets an award here.

To me, it is like watching two soccer teams fighting each other while the field is on fire. Both are trying to ‘win’ but missing the bigger problem—that we are a democracy! And, unfortunately, this has been the case since George Washington was in office. Greed is really the biggest issue we face—greed of power, greed of money. And I’d throw in there ‘bearing false witness,’ too.

Yes, I’m diving right into religion. This is certainly not what Jesus taught. In fact, he was pretty big on inclusion and fairness, and telling the truth, and exposing the bullshit… but I digress.

So here’s one small way to fight back—a DIY to take the country back: drive people to vote or rent a bus and make it a Voting Party Bus—anyone can ride it. Or be like Kathleen—she volunteers at the local orphanage. She started by teaching kids to sew and now she teaches them to swim. Kathleen is in her 80s. Making a difference.

At the end of the day, there’s no trophy for being an asshole. There is no trophy for creating a nation that creates opportunities for only those like them. Winning at the cost of marginalizing someone else is just shitty.

And right now, people are HOT. Angry people do dumb things. They share things without checking them. They believe things because they want them to be true. They prioritize the immediate win and forget to consider what it’s doing to the country—and to their own souls.

So: check your sources. Check them again.

When I was growing up, we watched Hill Street Blues, and at the end of the briefing, Captain Furillo would say, “Let’s be careful out there.”

That feels about right.