I’ve noticed that a great ice-breaker at social gatherings is when people ask who you’re backing in the elections, you reply with: “I don’t vote.” This generally results in one of the most well-worn expressions in American history. It’s so worn that if it was a coin, you wouldn’t see what emperor, er, a president is on the coin. That expression is: “Men DIED for your right to vote!” Oh, did they now? That’s funny because I thought they died for a ridiculous foreign policy decision of the United States government. Or some ill-advised “theory” like the “Domino Theory” or “Regime Change”. And how did those things protect the right to vote? Let’s examine that, shall we?
If “Men died for your right to vote!”, how did we manage to elect politicians after the Fall of Saigon in 1975? I daresay that if we didn’t get to elect every president that came after 1975 because of the Vietnam War, we could have chalked that one up as a success snatched out of the jaws of failure. Of course, that didn’t happen. Roughly 58,000 Americans died, we lost that war, and we didn’t lose the right to vote. However, about three million Vietnamese people died because of a political theory based off lining up game tiles on a tabletop. We could have based a political theory on Scrabble and, at least, had Vanna White to sell us on it. Oh, wait, that was Wheel of Fortune. Oh well, same thing when it comes to the United States foreign policy.
And how exactly was Saddam Hussein threatening our right to vote? He did it twice in a row, too, remember? Except the first time, we left him in power so we could invoke the Domino Vote later. Yet, we never did see Iraqi troops in front of polling places. No, the only troops we saw were American military forces, oops, I mean the police “guarding” us during every nifty color-coded “alert” that went on in the post-9/11 era. Remember those? Once upon a time, color-coding was something kids did when learning how to match clothes or pick out healthy vegetables. Then the government seized on that infantile idea to sell us on a paranoiac “run for the bunkers” alert system to tell us the terrorist forecast for the day. “Skies over America will be sunny and clear of hijacked aircraft, with a light shower of lone-wolf terrorist attacks. And now sports…”
Men died for this?! I think not. I think they died because they got drafted and couldn’t get a deferment like Dick Cheney did back in the day. I don’t think there’s been a war in our history where it can be undeniably proven that we were defending our right to vote. World War One? Ha, ha, ha! Really?! Seriously?! Ask the average American what that war was over and how it got started. They’ll get confused and think Hitler started it and World War Two was just World War One that went into extra innings. “Top of the ninth…Hitler’s in the lead…he shoots! He scores! Boo-yah!!!! Oooo, that’s going to hurt Britain, Joe!” I know, I’m getting baseball and basketball mixed up. But, look, people get two world wars mixed up, so what’s the dif?