How I Became a One-Issue Voter

Single issue voters always bothered me, always made me wonder, “How can you exclude everything save for that one issue (that often does not even affect you or your family directly or personally), whether it’s abortion, or guns, or the environment?” Please note, there are one-issue voters on both poles of all those issues.

However, I fear that I have become a one-issue voter myself, because I confess that a politician will NEVER get my vote if (s)he threatens affordable access to health care for people who have pre-existing conditions. And, no, (I am looking at you, Josh Hawley and Ann Wagner) saying you’ll fix it after you take it away doesn’t count. I would point out that Republicans (and it is generally Republicans who are (or at least were until the issue became toxic) threatening to take away affordable coverage for those pre-existing conditions) controlled the Congress and Presidency for 6 straight years during Bush-45 and barely even gave lip-service to the issue, much less took action.

For me this issue is personal. I have a daughter and granddaughter with auto-immune diseases. They deserve access to affordable health care. Everybody does. So any politician who threatens their access will never get my vote. And if you tell me it’s not important (because you don’t have to deal with it – yet), then you are my political enemy.

And if you, or someone you love or care about, doesn’t have a pre-existing condition, you can be thankful and then add the word, “yet.” Because, and especially if insurance companies get to decide what constitutes a pre-exisiting condition, it is almost inevitable that this issue will touch you. Yes, you may have a job with health benefits now, but how confident are you that that will be true in a year, or five, or ten…. Or will you be afraid to change jobs, take a promotion, for fear that your precious (and it is, indeed, precious) health insurance that covers now or future health challenges might change? Who can afford to wait for MediCare (which does cover those pre-exisiting conditions)?

A caring society cares for the health of all its citizens. Access to affordable health care is a right (to life).

Fear the Mob

– An Explanation, Not a Defense

I want to share a story. It’s one I’ve shared with numerous students over my career. Whether it makes anyone think differently or not, whether it will even give pause, I don’t know. But maybe it will explain how easily and quickly people can get caught up in a mob, in a moment.

It was the summer of my junior year in high school. I was traveling with some of my classmates on a church!-sponsored youth experience, working with other students from multiple European countries to rehab a castle in Untergruppenbach  Germany. We were, if memory serves (and, sadly, it’s not as good a servant as it used to be), the largest single contingent in the “camp.”

Conditions were, at least from an affluent American kid’s perspective, Spartan, although hardly something out of Oliver!, had it been filmed yet. We slept on cots in a room repurposed as a dormitory. But it was the food that became the bone of contention. Breakfast consisted of a kind of mush or oatmeal, mint tea, and bread. Our morning break was dark bread and more mint tea. Lunch was a repeat of breakfast. Not typical fare for us.

Our alleged leader, a young minister, apparently either took this “abuse” personally or took advantage of our complaining to try weasel his way into our hearts. (I freely admit that this is not an unbiased assessment of him; I didn’t like him, didn’t respect him, although, in my defense, his actions, and not just the one related in this anecdote, on this trip were the primary causes of my negative opinion.) In any case, about 3-4 days (as I recall) into the trip, he stood up at lunch one day, banged his bowl, and said, “We’re not taking this any more. Let’s go!”

It was, at that moment, I officially lost my mind... ...to the mob. Most (at least) of us also stood up, bowls of mush in hand, and, following his lead, stormed out the room, looking for the owner of the castle. Not sure what we were going to do when we found him; there were no chickens about, so “mushing and feathering” would seem to have been out. It didn’t take much stomping randomly through the building for some of us to decide, “Uh, this is stupid and embarrassing;” the mob lost steam and dissipated. We went from sheep to sheepishly returning to finish our gruel. 

That should have been the end of it, but it wasn’t, not for me. In retrospect, it remains one of the most frightening events of my life. I don’t pretend to be particularly modest about my intellectual abilities. But, for those brief minutes, my mind was not mine; I was not in control. I was just another anonymous follower. It is a feeling, one that strikes fear into my heart to this day, that I never want to repeat.

Imagine, now, had the grievance been serious, legitimate (at least in our perception), of long-standing, simmering on low-heat over a period of years. Cooks know it doesn’t take much more heat to turn a simmer into a raging boil, bubbling over onto the stove. If there’s no one there to turn down the heat, but instead add fuel to the fire (e.g., media and agenda-driven “leaders”)....

Think it couldn’t happen to you? Armies have relied on this semi-controlled sublimation of individual will for centuries. It’s the only rational explanation of the irrational act of charging to a certain death. Sports mobs, in and out of stadiums, are another common example. Mass hysteria is well documented. We all like to think we’re exceptional, to believe that we wouldn’t act that way, but there’s too much scientific evidence to the contrary for that to be true. Something to think about before we rush to judgment of others or absolve demagogues of responsibility.

Note: This sat in draft form for over two years, dating back to Ferguson and other events. The more things change....

July 4 and The Importance of History

I have neither the intellectual rigor nor academic credentials to claim the label “historian,” or really even “history buff.” Still, I do know stuff, a lot of it history from teaching and preparing to teach various courses. Maybe I can claim “history dilettante,” which kind of fits my approach to so many things.

Nevertheless, on the 4^th of July, I am disturbed by the number of people willing to ignore history, the number of people willing pretend history doesn’t matter, the number of people willing to twist history to fit their world view and agenda.

This holiday in particular seems to inspire people.

Conservatives proudly wave their flags and tout their beliefs, failing to recognize that the history of conservatism is the story of people swimming against the tide. In their time, conservatives opposed declaring independence and the American Revolution (Tories), ratifying the Constitution (anti-Federalists), abolition, passage and enforcement of the Civil War Amendments, women suffrage, organizational rights for workers, social security, social integration and Brown v. Board, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, civil rights protections for all people…. Change is scary and conservatives play an important role in making people slow down before adopting ill-conceived (even if usually well-intentioned) proposals without considering the inviolable Law of Unintended Consequences. But conservatives have consistently been on the wrong side of history. You can’t truly own your political philosophy without also owning its historical roots.

When you don’t know your history, you adopt slogans like “America First” without knowing its provenance. The slogan was used by the Ku Klux Klan in marches as early as the 1920s and as late as David Duke in 2016.

It was also used as an argument by Woodrow Wilson to keep us out of World War I and opponents of the League of Nations after that war. It was resurrected by Nazi sympathizers, anti-Semites, and isolationists, including Charles Lindbergh, during the 1930s to try to keep us out of World War II, or from even helping our (eventual) allies, and the short-lived AFC (America First Committee), formed in opposition to FDR in 1940, but disbanded for obvious reasons after Pearl Harbor. Pat Buchanan (who notoriously called WW II “an unnecessary war”) used it in his run for office in 2000 on the Reform Party ticket. Do you know who also tried to get the Reform Party nomination in 2000? Donald Trump (who called Buchanan a “Nazi-lover”). Although his campaign style may be consistent, apparently he forgot the origins of his now favorite slogan.

   And then there’s the just plain “bad” history. Although I reject that the Civil War, at its core, was about anything other than preserving and expanding slavery, I recognize the deep roots of the “lost cause” school. I also “know” that its goal was to transform sedition into nobility, but understand why others might reject that view. Today, however, someone said slavery was incidental and the true cause was taxes. Fortunately for my self-esteem, I do not know and did not teach this person; and my goal here is not to create a lesson on the cause(s) of the Civil War. I’ll just end with what I was tempted to say, the variously (and apparently often incorrectly) attributed quote, “It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool than to talk and remove all doubt of it.” I obviously do not always heed my own advice. 

Happy July 4, 2018.