Society will be safer when
people can carry guns into churches.
Our standard of living will
increase once we get rid of unions and bring business into our states.
We can create a much more
educated society if we pay teachers based on standardized test scores and then
let them spend all of their time teaching to the test.
We can get a much better crop
of teachers if we do nothing but attack them and tell their students and their
students’ parents just how worthless the teachers are.
If we eliminate taxes for
businesses, they will automatically start hiring people.
All of those propositions
wither and fade away when confronted with reason, but the people who keep
pushing this snake oil keep returning to office, year after year, election
after election.
We need voters who are
intelligent enough not to fall for the tactics that have put these merchants of
hate and division into office.
While I realize that the
Voting Rights Act of 1965 completely ruled out the tests that Jim Crow society
of the South used to keep African American voters from casting ballots and
rightfully so, it is still pleasant to think about a society where people might
actually exercise their intelligence when they step into the voting booth.
Perhaps prospective voters
should have to run through a basic checklist before they are allowed to
register.
1.
You cannot vote
if you think that people who have little or no money are not paying their fair
share, so you have to cut taxes to almost nothing for those who are fortunate
enough to have money.
2.
You have no
business voting if you believe that you need an assault weapon to protect you
from your neighbors, or if you actually think any arsenal you manage to build
is going to be able to hold off the federal government.
3.
You need to stay
away from the polls if you believe that any government as chaotic and
disorganized as ours could ever launch a successful plan to round up all of
your guns.
4.
No voting for you
if you buy into the idea that teachers who take six weeks of training in Teach
for America are automatically better than experienced teachers.
5.
Forget about
voting if you really think it is a good idea for your representative to accept
bills that are written by lobbyists and submit them as their own.
6.
You don’t have
the intelligence to vote if you buy into the idea that the 10th
Amendment enables state legislatures to disobey any federal law they want.
7.
You should stay
at home if you think that politicians who claim to be knowledgeable about
business really believe that it makes sense to cut, cut, and cut again, but not
to look seriously into increasing revenues.
8.
You have no
business voting if you believe the United States will be better off if we
involve our military in places like Iraq, Syria, and Iran.
The list
goes on and on. Our politicians (or more likely, the special interests who are
putting them into office and then keeping them there) have been able to
convince the voting public that ideas that are clearly not in the public’s best
interest are the only things protecting them from Armageddon.
It has been
done by appealing to envy- the idea that someone else, whether it be someone
who is African American, Hispanic, female, gay, is getting something and the
only way they are getting it is by taking it away from you.
It has been
done by appealing to fear- The government will take away your guns; the
government is teaching your children to hate God; the government is trying to
take your money and give it to people who want to just sit home, drink beer,
and let you do all of the work.
It has been
done through the spending of millions, perhaps billions, of dollars by special
interests, who are able to make even more money every time they can convince
the voting public to vote against its own interest.
There is not
a ghost of a chance that a Voter IQ bill could ever become reality, and perhaps
that is just as well. The idea that there is some kind of litmus test that we
have to have in order to cast a ballot goes against everything that makes this
country stand out from nearly every other country in the world.
Instead, our
best bet is to do whatever we can to raise the voters’ IQ while there is still
time to do so.
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