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America. The inherent value in a name should remain undisputed, like a title, a reputation for fair play, for an equitable outcome of political games, the contests which are said to provide each man with one vote. In truth, a union, republic or even constitutional democracy, can only hope to live up to its aspirations. Engraved in stone, a metaphor inscribed on a capriciously conceived parchment, beckons the founding concession of “one man, one vote.” America. With its purple mountain's majesty, with its spacious skies above fruited plains, a melting potted tapestry of cultural permissiveness, avails itself, promotes and sells itself as a land were anything is possible. It is a land of plenty. It is solicited to the world as the “land of opportunity” where a man's reach should exceed his grasp. However, that reach is subject to be cut, suspended in its effort to even finger a grasp. After the black vote was first won, more fighting was required to make those votes, that right to have a voice in government, even greatly muffled and strained, practical in a limited democracy. For freed (13th amendment) black citizens (14th amendment) the right to vote came after the Civil War, during Reconstruction. That came after the fifteenth amendment, during Jim Crow. The right to exercise the right to vote remained in question, hanged like the noose, a right for which they bled. The constitutional right to vote was kept well out of reach by Southern Democrats. In 1965 black and white men and women crossed Edmund Pettus Bridge en route to Montgomery. In one of the most violent acts of early systemic racism caught on camera, Alabama state troopers brutalized peaceful protesters as they sought their constitutional right to vote. That march ended at the capitol, it ended with president Johnson signing a voting rights act to fortify the Civil Rights Act signed the year before, which nurtured a right to vote afforded black men in 1870's fifteenth amendment.

Read about the often harsh, even cruel, realities of how those votes were hard won. Weigh for yourself the present value of voting in a democracy. Make a value judgement of how incremental apathy, disinterest, or what is too often taken for granted has brought America to its current state. The electoral process in America is nature and nurture. It manifests waves, creating stages, the foundations of which were knowingly or unknowingly, fortuitously or unfortunately rigged to favor the initial voters, white males of some wealth over age 21. That is how it began, how the rules were written, by them, and such is the nature of voting and election for America. That “democratic” system has been nurtured through time to include, to extend a fair shake, to all the minority groups excluded. Blacks in 1870, 1964, 1965, and on into infinity. Women in 1920. Native Americans in 1924. Chinese-Americans in 1943 and all the exclusions in between.

God almighty, Democracy needs nurturing. Democracy needs itself to be, an existential presumption that at the ballot box in 2020 can wax Hamlet in soliloquy. Contemporary Republicans provide reason for Democrats to perpetually protest, to legislate, to orate, to orchestrate fair and free elections, to endlessly polish the easily muted “one man, one vote.” Donald Trump would like a second term, possibly only to avoid being a civilian open to prosecution. Here is a man who brought nothing to the office but chaos who now is pandering for votes as only a tired huckster can. He has sunk to an unprecedented level of pathetic GOP posturing, using a pandemic to prevent voting. In America we are able to vote. So I emphatically implore you to vote. Your life, democracy's life (or many peoples' lives) depends on it.