Tuesday, I had the wonderful experience that had been presented by someone, who I thought was a wonderful friend that working the polls would be a wonderful opportunity. I’m wondering what I did to make this person mad at me. By late afternoon, I was ready to jettison any semblance of neutral non-partisan responsibility, and start hitting people.
Wave after wave of old white people flooded the polling location. They came with their canes, walkers, wheelchairs. Blind, deaf, dumb. One poor soul with dementia kept walking around and saying he just wanted to vote. There were those too frail to get out of their vehicles and had to do curbside voting. These were not rich people. These were people who lived in a working class precinct. Their clothes were old and frayed, and it was even odds that their cars would make it out of the parking lot. These were people surviving because of social security, Medicare, veteran benefits, government supplemental programs, and welfare.
Many didn’t know how to work the e-slate and had to be shown how to operate the machines. All they kept saying they wanted to vote straight republican ticket. Bizarro World could not have come up with a stranger scenario. Every time was like a punch in the gut. Of course, you had to sit there in stunned silence.
It’s as if Mexican-Americans approached and asked I.C.E. to detain them; as if full-scholarship students dropped out of college to take a job working the register at Taco Bell.
Implausible? Hispanics and young voters are top projects for republicans, and they have already made in-roads with these groups, especially young Hispanics who are buying into the time-honored conservative mantra that if you vote republican, you will become rich, which will then be used as an example of proper assimilation. It is guaranteed that conservatives will do their best to convince these groups, like they did with old, poor white people, to vote against their interest. Look for more Latinos to demonize undocumented immigrants, and for college students to say that going into debt because of the free markets response of growing tuition is more patriotic than receiving governmental grants.
Resistance is becoming more futile
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