Dear Republican U.S. Senators: Stop messing with mail-in voting

Letter I sent to Wyoming U.S. Senators Barrasso and Enzi:

We are lucky here in Wyoming that we have easy access to voting and competent county clerks to ensure that the rules are followed. I've seen many election days as an election judge. When we switched from paper to electronic voting, all of us received training on the new systems. 

Up until the most recent primary, I always voted in person. The experience was gratifying. When I worked the polls, I had many opportunities to work with old friends and to see my neighbors arrive, enthusiastic to do their civic duty. It always seemed like a holiday, even when I had to take the day off from my state job to be at the precinct.

Now that I am retired and partially disabled, I no longer work the polls and no longer venture out to my polling place which are now called voting centers instead of the old precinct set-up. I voted absentee and so did my wife and daughter. My wife is a type-one diabetic and we both are worried about Covid-19 as are most high-risk seniors. So we requested and received absentee ballots without needing an explanation because that is how Wyoming does it.

We will also vote absentee in the general election. All of the news about the slowdown at the U.S. Postal Service concerns us. Yes, we can always go to the city and county building and our ballots into the secure drop-off box. But this also means that we have to drive down there, find a parking place, put on our masks, and go to the drop-off box. What makes absentee voting by mail so preferable is the obvious ease of the process. Mail delivery is quick here in Cheyenne. I often mail a bill one day and see the debit in my account within days. 

So why is Postmaster DeJoy messing around with a system that works so well? I am suspicious of the timing of the dismantling of the quick-sorting machines and removal of convenient postal boxes. Absentee and mail-in voting depends on a dependable USPS. Mr. DeJoy assures us that the system has not been slowed down and then we see that he was a major donor to Mr. Trump and was then appointed to the postmaster position. As I was always told as a government employee, do not create any conflict of interest or even the appearance of one. 

Mr. DeJoy appears to have a conflict of interest and should be removed. I also urge you to support the House bill that guarantees the efficiency and funding of the USPS. If you don't, we can only assume that you support Mr. Trump's campaign to sabotage the post office and suppress the vote. You do believe in everyone's access to the polls, don't you? Then make sure that the functions of the American voting system, once the model for the world, will not be interfered with. 

We are watching.

Sincerely,

Michael Shay

P.S.: When I write letters like these, I tone it down. I want the senator or most likely his staff members to read it and I can register my complaint. If I wrote a letter saying what I really felt, it would start something like "Dear Sen. Barrasso: You miserable son of a bitch and Moscow Mitch ass-kisser. Stop f*cking around with our right to vote." Something like that. There are many ways I could phrase it. I am a concerned citizen and elder of my tribe so I am supposed to show a little couth, even when blogging. I try to do the same on Facebook because I know that Big Brother FB is watching. So, if Republicans keep up their attacks on voting, I may have to adopt a tougher stance. My missives may not get read but I will feel much better. 

Another generation betrayed by those who should know better

This Saturday, thousands of young people will stage the March for Our Lives anti-gun violence rally in Washington, D.C. Expecting huge crowds, officials have changed the opening day of the annual Cherry Blossom Festival to Sunday, March 25. This also marks the beginning of tourist season for D.C. Spring is gorgeous. The cherry blossoms that surround the tidal basin are spectacular. But this year, the weekend's focus will be on ways that we can stop the slaughter of our children in their schools.

I can only guess at the pain that the Marjory Stoneman Douglas students from Parkland, Fla., feel as they watch their elders dither over gun control. These are the results you get from us – hypocrisy and betrayal. The students’ adversaries are monumental. Its structure will have to be dismantled brick by brick.

I imagine what would have happened if a gunman had entered my Florida school 50 years ago and murdered 17 of my classmates and teachers.

The year, 1968. The school, Father Lopez Catholic High School in Daytona Beach. We 17-year-old juniors have Valentine’s Day on our minds. I hoped I had bought just the right thing for my girlfriend. My girlfriend might have been contemplating the very same thing. Basketball season was winding down and it looked like my Green Wave team was going to win the conference. We had all given up something for Lent. Chocolate. French fries. Cussing. Fear of eternal damnation kept us chaste so there was no reason to give up sex, although we joked about it. Spring break was on the horizon, as was summer, and we were thinking about summer jobs and days on the beach.

We had an open campus. Anyone could walk in and did. Moms delivered forgotten lunches and homework. Visitors dropped by at any time. We would have been sitting ducks for a killer.

It never happened at my school and never has. If 17 of my classmates had been killed, I would have known them all – we had fewer than 400 students in four grades. One of the dead or wounded could have been me. I like to think that I would have been a hero no matter what. I have nothing to base that on because I had never faced a shot fired in anger – and I still haven’t. We would all be devastated. We would be looking for solace and answers.

What would adults have told us? Don’t worry. This is an aberration. The gunman was crazy. It will never happen again.

And we would have believed them.

That was our first mistake. It wouldn’t be our last.

On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., would be gunned down in Memphis. Our school’s mostly-black neighborhood would not be safe. Riots would erupt on Second Avenue which, during those segregated times, was where the black population lived.  

On June 6, Robert Kennedy would be murdered by an assassin. I idolized the Kennedys. RFK and JFK were imperfect human beings. But I was a teen looking for some heroes.  

Florida native Charles Whitman murdered 16 people, most of them from a perch at the University of Texas tower, in July 1966. Not the first mass murder but the fact that it was a former Marine sniper made news. And he was a very angry white man.

On Valentine’s Day 1968, the Tet Offensive was just winding down in Vietnam. Surely this meant the end of a failed experiment, one that was claiming the lives of my peers and many Vietnamese. The war dragged on for another seven years. Our elders, “the best and the brightest,” insisted it was the right thing to do.

None of the adults gave us the real facts about sex. Parents and nuns and priests decided that fear was enough of a deterrent. They were mostly correct, although at least one of our female classmates missed part of the senior year with an unplanned pregnancy. You would not be surprised that pregnant teens found the same censure at public schools. It just wasn’t done. The boys were never blamed.

We knew betrayal, we didn’t yet have a name for it. Members of our generation possessed a simmering rage. That was a problem, because the Summer of Love and the Age of Aquarius had dawned. Peace, love, and understanding. If that was true, how come people were filled with anger? Blacks vs. Whites. Cops vs. pot smokers. Rednecks vs. hippies. Viet Cong vs. the U.S.A. Irish Catholics vs. Protestants. Jews vs. Arabs and almost everyone else.

Flash forward to the present. Seventeen killed and a dozen wounded at a Florida high school. The only ones making sense are 16- and 17-year-old classmates of the dead at Douglas High School. Adults in positions of power are dangerous fools. They spout nonsense that get their children killed.

Betrayed. It’s déjà vu all over again.

It may have its roots in the betrayal that ignited our generation. That was never resolved, or forgotten, just buried as the years passed. We weren’t the first. It’s possible that adults of every generation betray their children. Over time, we lose touch with our values and our kids pay the price. You can say that every generation needs to experience hardships to find out the true nature of the world. Center for Disease Control figures come up with 1.55 million deaths from firearms in the U.S. from 1968-2016. This includes the span of many generations. Wouldn’t a smart, caring community have come up with some solutions by now?

Good people do bad things. Bad people do bad things. That’s an old story. But why do we make it easier for anyone to buy an AR-15, walk into a school, and shoot down 17 people? Haven’t we learned our lessons by now? Columbine, Aurora, Sandy Hook, Orlando, Las Vegas. The list goes on and on. If we don’t do something about it, we betray our children. If we do something about it, we betray only the NRA and our thick-headed politicians.

The choice should be clear. More betrayal, the generational rite of passage? Or do we do something new and different and constructive?

Which will it be?

Donald Trump's Know-Nothing attitude would have doomed my Famine Irish ancestors

A Thomas Nast cartoon in Harper's Weekly depicts ape-like Irishmen beating up police on St. Patrick's Day 1867.  

Great read from a 1/10/18 article on Irish Central by Cahir O'Doherty: "President Donald Trump would have turned away the Famine Irish just like the Salvadorans."  Go to https://www.irishcentral.com/opinion/cahirodoherty/donald-trump-famine-irish-el-salvador

I don't know much about my great-great grandfather Thomas Shay.

He was Irish, as you might deduce from his last name, born in County Clare.

He left Ireland in the late 1840s (probably 1848) bound for the U.S.

He married Anna Agnes Burns and had three children when they were recorded in the 1850 census as residents of Monroe County, N.Y. By the 1870 census, the Shay family had moved to Iowa and eight children were listed on the rolls.

Thomas died in 1879 and is buried in Johnson County, Iowa.

His first name is my late father's first name and my middle name

My late Aunt Patricia researched these details before the wide use of the Internet and the advent of ancestry.com. She printed out a family tree on a dot-matrix printer. She put the evidence into a memory book for my daughter, born in 1993.

That's what I know. I also have read about anti-Irish sentiment in the mid-19th century. White people feared non-white people, although they were willing to use them as slaves and indentured servants. Strange to think that Irish immigrants were depicted in American papers as unwashed, uncouth bumpkins, or as monkeys and apes. They were Catholic, too, as were their swarthy cousins from Spain, Italy, and Mexico. You know, "Shithole" countries as Trumpists say.

The Know Nothings live. They were out in force last fall in Charlottesville, them and  their vile attitudes and precious tiki torches. They are descendants of the anti-Irish Know Nothings, although I would guess that some of them have Irish or Scots-Irish bloodlines. Scary to think how many Trumpists have Irish surnames. They do not know their history, and they don't care to learn.

Trump's policies may have doomed my Irish ancestors. But who knows -- maybe the Irish Shays would have survived in Ireland and my DNA would have never taken the pathways that eventually led to me. The Shay line would not be in its seventh generation of causing trouble in the U.S.

Immigration can sure be a random thing. You never know where curtailing it or encouraging it will lead. Sometimes you get a Barack Obama.

And sometimes you get a Donald Trump.

A cartoon from the 1850s by the "Know-Nothings" accusing the Irish and German immigrants of negatively affecting an election. From Victoriana Magazine.

Republicans are aghast that anger rages in America

Republicans are aghast that someone would be so angry as to take a shot at Congressional reps practicing for a baseball game in Alexandria, Virginia.

I am aghast that they would be aghast at this turn of events.

Republicans and their Fox News mouthpiece have been stoking American anger for decades.  This led to the simmering stew of hatred that begat Trump.

A Republican rep says that America is "fraying around the edges" earlier this week on CBS This Morning. And who is responsible for that turn of events? A Bernie Sanders fan who was a little frayed around the edges, frayed enough to go shoot up a baseball field? He was angry. Many are angry. And they have guns.

What do these Republicans expect? They stoked grassroots anger for eight years during the Obama administration. And the recipients of this barrage of hate were not all Republicans. A fair number of Democrats and Independents watch Fox, listen to Rush Limbaugh, and voted for Trump.

So who's to blame? All of us. For inciting hatred and letting it slide -- or stoking it with snark. For not countering hatred with love and tolerance. For not doing something to make the world a better place.

I am as guilty as you are. I have been poking fun at conservatives online since 2005. For eight years, I assumed that we were a civilized nation with a minority of ignorant, regressive haters. I was smug. I made fun of those Obama haters who carried misspelled signs to Tea Party rallies. I even invented a character called Tea Party Slim, whom I imbued with the many TP utterings I heard at rallies and on the Internet.

All of that only stoked more hatred and resentment. Our leader, Barack Obama, provided an example for us to look up to. Meanwhile, he did little or nothing to stem the tide of resentment. Obama didn't fight hard enough for the America we wanted. Neither did I.

It's game on now. The enemy is obvious. Our government is trying to kill us and our planet. For the second time in my 66 years, I know who to fight. During Vietnam, my government wanted to kill all of its young men in pursuit of a rotten Cold War policy in Vietnam. Our government would rather kill its sons than admit it was wrong. That's why the trauma of Vietnam will never end. Let's hope Ken Burns informs us of the real reasons behind Vietnam this fall on PBS. I am not optimistic.

Now our government wants to maximize riches and marginalize the rest of us. We are on our way to be serfs, a return to the Dark Ages of Europe. Ironically, Europe is experiencing a golden age.

Response is to #Resist with the tools we have. We have wit and grit. #Resist on your own and with like-minded people. Marginalize those who urge violence. Many of those people are not our friends and may be insurgents in our midst. Now that an apparent anti-Trump person shot up a baseball field and some Republican reps, look for law enforcement to plant operatives in #Resist groups. It may have happened already. This sounds paranoid. Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean someone isn't following you. Read some of the first-hand account of the antiwar and Civil Rights movements. They often were the targets of COINTELPRO units of the FBI. They were provocateurs who knew that to turn a protest violent invited a violent response from the police. No better way to discredit dirty hippies than to show them getting beat up by the police. The 1968 Police Riot in Chicago was caused by those dirty hippies (and Yippies) that were getting bloodied by Mayor Daley's Finest. At least that's how Middle America saw it and turned to Tricky Dick and Kissinger for a solution for Vietnam.

You saw how that worked out.

Angry Americans have now turned to a spoiled rich boy who gets his way because the Republicans in Congress have fallen into lockstep behind him. Shame on them. Shame on us for letting it happen.

#Resist