In the much bandied aphorism, “A society grows great when men plant trees whose shade they know they will never sit in.”
What happens to a society when selfish, short-sighted, narrow-minded, egomaniacal, power-obsessed men cut down every tree in sight? And future generations will never know their shade?
History will recognize this generation of America as the one that rolled back the Civil Rights era.
Our time will be known to posterity as a generation that did not plant trees of liberty and justice for all, but struck them down.
It’s shameful. It’s pathetic. And all of us, individually and collectively, must reckon with that.
And if we are ever to recover from this vicious injustice on future generations, we will have to spend the rest of our lives fixing the damage and rebuilding something better.
We have a long way to go.
The destruction process is ongoing, and there’s no telling how much longer the destruction will last or how much worse it will get.
The U.S. Supreme Court in just the last 16 years has gutted campaign finance regulations, gutted regulation against gerrymandering, and gutted the Voting Rights Act, to name a select few and fundamental.
If you were setting out a plan to rob American voters of power and destroy representative democracy so that elections can be rigged, bought, and sold, and politicians run amok without consequence or accountability, you couldn’t do better.
If we can’t regulate obscene amounts of money buying elections, and we can’t regulate politicians from open partisan gerrymandering, and we can’t have the basic protections of the Voting Rights Act, American democracy is effectively neutered in favor of a rigged game.
Rich people and corporations spend unlimited money to buy candidates and elections. The politicians rig election outcomes with gerrymandering and eliminate competition. States and cities, town and country, carved into fiefdoms for political machines. Shameless propaganda propagated: At best, conditioning; at the least, mass confusion. The politicized courts a rubber stamp on the system. And representative democracy dies.
No individual policy or issue can overcome the primary injustice of rigged districts and bought-and-sold elections.
The pillars of the Republic are corrupted beyond legitimate function.
The “Republic” becomes in-name-only, a veneer masking corruption, oligarchy, lawlessness.
As I have long written, gerrymandering and the campaign finance/public corruption loop are the two central poisons in the bloodstream of America’s body politic.
If legislative outcomes are predetermined by gerrymandering, and all other races are tainted by the unlimited spending of hundreds of millions of dollars of dark money by nefarious backroom actors, true representation of the people’s interest becomes a quaint ideal, instead of a foundational value that can never be compromised.
Faithful and honest representation of the people becomes the central lie instead of the central promise of our social contract.
Cynicism, corruption, backsliding, misrepresentation, abuse, carelessness, recklessness, deprivation, degradation, division, ignorance, hatefulness, these become our cultural and political masters.
The U.S. Supreme Court has unleashed a cascade of gerrymandering across the nation: Brazen public corruption of our elections in a rush of unprecedented scale and fury.
We are in a frenzy of blatantly cheating millions upon millions upon millions of voters out of fair elections in America. Tens of millions, twenties of millions? Thirties of millions? Hundreds?
It turns out that Ohio’s experience in 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024 with open unconstitutional partisan gerrymandering was not just a horribly embarrassing episode of cynical, feckless Ohio politicians debasing themselves in their lust for power, it was a trial run for the entire nation doing the same.
Ohio was a primer to measure how degraded politicians could get and get away with it.
Now they’re going hog wild, in some cases bringing voters along as accomplice, and in others politically assaulting and insulting voters outright.
Louisiana, Tennessee, Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia, Virginia, California, Washington; it’s actually almost difficult right now to keep track of how many of our nation’s state leaders have willfully fallen to prostrate themselves and crawl through the moral muck and patriotic treachery of cheating voters with gerrymandering.
But alas, in existence the only constant is change, and one day this destruction too will end.
We will eventually, collectively have to deal with the damage done.
One can only hope that some semblance of our constitutional Republic can be saved from the poisons and the depravity of our lawmakers and elected officials.
This generation of America has squandered our birthright.
At 250 years of age, we’ve turned the world’s oldest democracy into a jalopy for the next generation.
We’ve forsaken those who came before us, and the blood and tears they shed to win us the rights and freedoms that we now betray.
While the short-sighted cynics, the ignorant, and the debased celebrate, the rest will have to spend the rest of our lives trying to scrub away this awful stain, seeking solemnly to establish something somehow more just and honest and true than it’s ever been before.
Either we will, or some future generation — at likely great cost — will surely be forced.
This story is republished from the Ohio Capital Journal under a Creative Commons license. View the original article.
