LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Dear Editor, I don’t mean to get personal here, but I’ve never been this old before. And I’ve heard, on good authority, that I’ll never be this young again. Interesting conundrum.
So what does it mean? Well, it all depends on the day of the week and, sometimes, the time of day. On a purely physical level, some days hurt more than others. The thumbs, the knees, the back, the hips, the neck. Oh, my aching joints. They snap at me, “No! No! Let’s not go there; let’s not do that. Stop!”
When that happens, it’s straight to the aspirin. Sometimes it does the job. Sometimes it doesn’t. On those “doesn’t” days, I just put the world on hold and try to catch up with my reading. Unfortunately, that’s usually a losing battle: it’s tough to ignore the desperate pleas from my joints. Or maybe I just grit my teeth and grin and bear it. Either way, I know I’m not going to get much done.
Other days, the world looks a little brighter and feels a little better. I can hop in the truck and drive over to one of the restaurants offering an Early-Bird dinner discount. I don’t have to try to remember the name of my orthopedist, or scare up the phone number of my physical therapist to make an appointment. I can forget for just a bit that there’s less and less hair up top for my barber to cut and the bags under my eyes keep getting bigger and bigger, while my eyes themselves seem to take in less and less.
I read something the other day about a famous magazine editor, Norman Podhoretz. Sitting for an interview when he was 95 years old, he explained why he kept a photo of himself – taken when he was 22 – on his coffee table. His response? “I think that’s what I look like.”
I feel the same way, despite what the mirror tells me every morning when I take my life into my hands and scrape the stubble off my face. That guy in the mirror can’t be me. Ask me and I’ll tell you – as far as I’m concerned, that senior yearbook photo is spot on. Springsteen called them “Glory Days.” On a good day, I can convince myself that they’re still here. A few character lines since then? Sure. But nothing to get worked up about.
Not every day is good. What you want to do and what your body will let you do can be two entirely different things. Sometimes you need someone to cut you a break. Sometimes you need a little accommodation to get something done – especially something important.
Like voting. That’s where mail ballots come into the picture. They make it possible for many folks – voters who might not be able to get to the polls – to participate in the electoral process. Universal suffrage, the right of every qualified citizen to vote, is something we take for granted. It’s definitely something that was a long time a-coming. It took a few amendments to the Constitution over the course of 132 years to reach that point. It wasn’t until 1870 that the right to vote was expanded to include Black men. It took another 50 years for women, no matter what their race, to be included.
Voting rights were not expanded freely or generously. It took a civil war before the United States granted emancipation, citizenship, and voting rights to the formerly enslaved. The struggle of women to vote, remarkably, lasted well into the 20th century.
Even after the expansion of voting rights, the promise of post-Civil War reconstruction was stymied by the implementation of the Black Codes and Jim Crow laws that erected barriers to full participation in American democracy.
In some of our own lifetimes, poll taxes, literacy tests, and the allwhite primary were used as tools of voter suppression. Not long ago, a friend here in San Marcos showed me his grandfather’s poll tax receipt. That opened my eyes wider than any history lesson every could.
The purpose of the tax? “To improve the quality and ‘responsibility’ of the electorate,” according to Texapedia. (This makes it sound like some weird effort in support of the disgraced pseudoscience of eugenics.) The net effect? “It was a codified effort to keep the ballot in the hands of white men and upper middle class and affluent white women,” explains the Texas Women’s Foundation.
President Lyndon Johnson, a Hill Country native who studied in Hays County and represented Hays County in Congress, finally pulled the plug on official roadblocks to voting with the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. I wasn’t old enough to vote back then, but if I had been, and knowing what I know now, I’d have been saying, along with a majority of 1964 voters, “All the Way with LBJ!”
I’ve been fortunate to be able to vote by mail. So were about 5,000 other Hays County voters – voters of both parties – in the 2024 Presidential election. On average, somewhere in the neighborhood of about four percent of Hays County voters cast their ballots by mail. Some, like me, because of age, some because of illness or disability, some are away serving in the military, some are within weeks of giving birth, others are absent from the county at election time, and still others are in custodial care. But all of them are voters who want to be sure their voices are heard.
Despite the progress we’ve made when it comes to voting, it seems you can’t keep a bad idea down.
The President, who this week voted by mail himself, wants to pull the plug on mail ballots. His claim? Preventing fraud. I did a lot of digging into that, but it’s just not supported by the facts. Time Magazine, just days ago, cited a study by the National Statistical Association finding that there is “no evidence that voting by mail increases the risk of voter fraud overall.” Other studies have come to the same conclusion time and time again.
Makes me wonder if the real fraud here is the unsupported charge that mail voting is “corrupt as hell” and “rigged.” Talk about fake news!
Bottom line? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Sincerely, Jon Leonard San Marcos
