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62705. Fax: (217) 753-3958. E-mail: editor@illinoistimes.com
NOTES FROM A CITIZEN CANVASSER
I’m just back from election canvassing on environmental issues in Milwaukee, where I exercised my need to do my part in a swing state. The experience reminded me how much I dislike door-to-door canvassing: Inaccurate voter lists (“My mother isn’t at home because she died five years ago”); irritable homeowners who assume you are an enemy of their candidate of choice and more than prepared to give you a good piece of their minds; and the aching need to use the bathroom with no usable facility in sight (too indelicate to ask the voter). [Those nuisances were outweighed by] the accolades for being the volunteer who traveled the farthest (beating out Tony Dean from Long Grove, who was former director of conservation under Gov. Dan Walker); a breakfast of wonderful Brueggerman’s rosemary bagels; one of the best weather weekends so far this fall; and, most important, the warm glow of knowing that of the 90 doors I knocked on and the 50 phone calls I made, someone may be more inclined to consider the environment when voting for president on Nov. 2.
Now that I’m back home, I feel a need to share the joy, so here are a few of the nonpartisan ways that people can get out the vote in 2004:
For information on how to help monitor the votes in areas of concern such
as Peoria, East St. Louis, and Chicago, go to www.electionprotectionvolunteer.org.
To educate voters on the environmental records of the candidates, go to
www.sierraclubvotes.org/roadtosomewhere.
To help promote fair, transparent, and accurate elections by Election Day
Web volunteering, go to www.votewatch.us.
You can also offer to work in your precinct as an election judge (although you will have to declare a party for this particular job) or as a poll-watcher. Drive someone to the polls on Election Day. Remind your family, friends, and coworkers to vote. Model good citizenship for your children by voting on Nov. 2. It really does feel good to participate in democracy.
Diane Lopez Hughes
Springfield
FOUR MORE YEARS OF ROPE
Bush is warning us that “Kerry’s stands would be a threat to world peace.” What world peace? Where? And they scream, “Four more years!” I think the world is already “bushed”!
But four more years wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. They didn’t have quite enough rope to hang themselves with the first four, but the next four will provide them with rope to spare. And their place in history will be etched even deeper, more permanently, in the chapter of America’s lower point, and a time when she faced her greatest threat — as a nation — by an “enemy within.” They tried to shred her Bill of Rights; they tried to twist her into a new form, a nation controlled by them through a permanent plutocracy: the wealthy ruling the nation and the world. But they will fail because America, once the beacon and symbol of freedom to all, is too precious to lose.
So I say, give them four more years. The whole world is watching this happen and will rise to the challenge. All humanity needs the former America, that beacon of freedom, not the neo-America being set up now to rule the world.
Hitler envisioned an empire than would last 1,000 years and be spread across all of Eurasia. Our far-right evangelical ideologues have a more ambitious vision: an empire spread across the globe, building little empires as we go, installing “freedom and democracy.” And how long could this go on? Decades? Centuries? Millennia? Might depend on how much fossil fuel one has control of. Control of the oil by those with the most power bodes ill for the world.
Of course, in the big picture, history is just repeating itself, but this time in a most grandiose and final way.
Robert Waldmire
Rochester
FIGHTING IS PART OF THE DEAL
Hazel, sorry to hear about your empty seat and student [Hazel Rozema, “Letters,” Oct. 7]. I hope and pray for her safe return home. I’m sure you do feel anguish about the student’s being in Iraq.
However, I’m betting this student was using the military education benefits to pay for her education. Part of her tuition is paying your wages to teach. This student also willingly, voluntarily signed up for military service. She was trained for a specific job/duty and has now been called upon to perform that job/duty. I guess it’s OK to receive the education benefits as long as you don’t need to perform your job or duty?
You also mention reinstatement of the draft. H.R.163 [the bill authorizing reinstatement of the compulsory service, sponsored by U.S. Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y.] failed by a vote of 2-402 on Oct. 5. So you are voting for a candidate from the same party as the sponsor of this bill? Hmm, interesting.
Jeff Davis
Dawson
STILL HOT FOR TEACHER
Veda Millington. 1960. And the big ol’ piano at Central Grade School. Not a day goes by these days that I don’t think of the words to a song we sang every day, with Mrs. Millington accompanying us on the piano: “Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me . . .” These words were ingrained into our psyches. Of course, what did we know for nothin’? We were sixth-graders in a peaceful world. How could have we known then that Vietnam was coming head-on at us? Even after we were in it, what did we know except what we were told?
What we couldn’t have known then was that Vietnam would be the war that would define our country as an imperialistic power capable of grandiose errors in judgment. By the ’70s, when even our president understood and even acknowledged that we had to leave, we, as Americans, would begin the process of trying to heal ourselves of the divisions made within our nation and our own families and to swear to ourselves that would we never let this happen again.
So what are we, a nation of amnesiacs? These days, when the world seems absolutely turned on its head and once again we find ourselves a divided nation over a war that can’t be won, can’t we say to ourselves that there is a better way to conduct ourselves in the world? Did we really learn so little from Vietnam? We have waged such a terrible violence against another country’s people and have killed tens of thousands of them, and our own soldiers are once again fighting and dying in a war that was based on lies from our government.
We have a president who, instead of consulting his own intelligence and heart — or, for that matter, the Bible — found an attorney who would reinterpret the language of the Geneva Conventions to conclude that one of the most basic human rights we have — not to be tortured — was inapplicable in this situation because of the terrorist acts against our country on 9/11. Here’s the thing — here’s how Jesus put it: “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of them, my brethren, ye have done it to me.” And as I have heard it in a more modern context: How we treat the least of us is who we are. Doesn’t it then reflect mightily punily on ourselves?
I can’t help but wishing our president and this administration had met up with one Veda Millington.
Lin Wolf
Virginia
GOP HANDS STATE TO DEMOCRATS
It’s a sad thing when you have a president who is pro-life and a wife, Laura, and mother, Barbara Bush, who are pro-abortion. You would think they would support their son and husband in public, at the least. You have a Republican, Alan Keyes, who is pro-life and doesn’t get any support from Bush or the Illinois Republican Party. They just gave a U.S. Senate seat to Barack Obama. Who are they going to run for governor in ’06? The Democrats are going to run the state for the next 20 years.
Danny Faulkner
Springfield
This article appears in Oct 21-27, 2004.
