Why vote? To keep republic!
As we approach a primary election, one hears and may think, “Why vote?”
All one sees and reads these days is: The VA is so filled with regulations and bureaucrats that it can’t do its job. The IRS is deeply corrupt. Our national debt is completely out of bounds, and no one seems interested in correcting it. Our national highways and bridges have gone into dangerous disrepair. Our national defense forces have been drastically reduced in critical times. Our national foreign policy seems merely a shadow. Very important, our Congress seems to have degenerated into impotency.
George Washington, in his farewell letter, wrote, “I have already intimated to you the danger of parties in the state, with particular reference to the founding of them on geographical discriminations.
“This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but in those of the more popular form it is seen in its greatest rankness and is truly their worst enemy.
“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension which in different ages and countries, has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration.
“It agitates the community with ill founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrections.”
At the end of the national convention which wrote and approved the American Constitution, some delegates felt it was flawed and proposed that it be held until spring.
Benjamin Franklin, then 84, said, “I am a very old man now, and have learned that most things people do have something wrong.” The conference approved the draft. He added, “But I notice the sun on the back of the chairman’s chair. I believe it is a rising, and not a setting, sun.”
As he departed, he encountered a lady who seemed discouraged. He said, “Madam, you have a republic. If you can keep it.”
Neil D. Van Sickle, Kalispell