Be Careful What You Wish For

Posted

To the Editor:
This often used expression is meant to warn us against the unforeseen consequences of our desires. It’s a caution against our ability to clearly judge circumstances ahead or even know what we, ourselves, want in the future. Another related use of those words might be that once we decide what we want we often try to reinterpret facts to confirm our choices. We would argue that a major difference in our political parties these days is how we treat facts. After we criticized this paper for a selectively narrow definition of active voter suppression a Mr. A. Hoernschemeyer picked up the Republican flag and tried to advance it. A gallant gesture but against the wrong enemy. The needed battle lines should be all of us versus untruth, all of us versus injustice, all of us versus callous disregard of others.
We’ve made our case against Mr. Warden’s editorial. Now we’d like to respond to Mr. H’s letter. One of his first statements is that “there is a lot of evidence that there was voter fraud in the last election”. Well, the experts can’t seem to find that evidence in any meaningful amount. The assessments are typically “used to be rampant, now it’s an anomaly”, as stated in the National Geographic survey or “vanishingly rare” in the Brennan Center for Justice study. What is abundant is Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of fraud in 2020. He also did this in 2016 with Hillary Clinton, claiming some 5 million fraudulent votes for her. His own commission couldn’t find any proof of that assertion either. Assertions become evident by simply being spouted. In some peoples’ minds that can turn to “evidence” either through repetition in an echo chamber of like mindedness or by wishful thinking.
Mr. H. also says that the Covid virus “will morph into a common disease much like the common flu…” That’s a curiously optimistic prediction considering that Missouri numbers of new cases have spiked 48% in the last two weeks. The new Delta Variant is more contagious and deadly than the original virus and so it seems the viral morphing that’s being done is in the opposite direction of taming itself into the “common flu”, much as we’d all like for Mr. H’s version to be our reality.
Are we also not to complain about gerrymandering because Mr. H says it was started by and named after a Democrat? (Actually, it was a Democrat-Republican.) But, whatever party Governor Gerry of Massachusetts was back in 1812, he was cheating people (Federalists) out of their full vote by unscrupulously redrawing voting districts. Today Republican legislatures are targeting Democrats and Blacks with exactly, but not exclusively, such measures. It’s still voter suppression and pretending otherwise is still untruthful, still unjust and still in flagrant disregard of the voters it victimizes. We should all be against any voter suppression...on principle. America’s promise should not be debased by gamesmanship, the enticement of power, or winking self-delusion. The world already has more than enough self-cancelling antagonists each wishing for domination by any means available. That desire is a long-term trap. It invariably leaves people living in distrust, hate, and rubble. We simply can’t allow ourselves to be so caught up in the smallness of in-fighting that we lose sight of the big picture ideals that have made our country not just great, but noble. Our wish, if we are to dare, is not to perpetually combat people like Mr. Warden and Mr. Hoernschemeyer, it’s to live in principled community with them.