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Doctor Delia
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Get Out And Vote
A fellow artist sent this to me and I was terribly moved by it. We forget all to soon that our rights are not guaranteed.
WHY WOMEN SHOULD VOTE
This is the story of our Grandmothers and Great-grandmothers; they lived only 90 years ago.
Remember, it was not until 1920
that women were granted the right to go to the polls and vote.
The women were innocent and defenseless, but they were jailed
nonetheless for picketing the White House, carrying signs asking
for the vote.
(Lucy Burns)
And by the end of the night, they were barely alive.
Forty prison guards wielding clubs and their warden's blessing
went on a rampage against the 33 women wrongly convicted of
'obstructing sidewalk traffic.'
They beat Lucy Burns, chained her hands to the cell bars above
her head and left her hanging for the night, bleeding and gasping
for air.
(Dora Lewis)
They hurled Dora Lewis into a dark cell, smashed her
head against an iron bed and knocked her out cold. Her cell mate,
Alice Cosu, thought Lewis was dead and suffered a heart attack.
Additional affidavits describe the guards grabbing, dragging,
beating, choking, slamming, pinching, twisting and kicking the women.
Thus unfolded the 'Night of Terror' on Nov. 15, 1917,
when the warden at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia ordered his
guards to teach a lesson to the suffragists imprisoned there because
they dared to picket Woodrow Wilson's White House for the right
to vote.
For weeks, the women's only water came from an open pail. Their
food--all of it colorless slop--was infested with worms.
(Alice Paul)
When one of the leaders, Alice Paul, embarked on a hunger strike, they tied her to a chair, forced a tube down her throat and poured liquid into her until she vomited. She was tortured like this for weeks
until word was smuggled out to the press.
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/suffrage/nwp/prisoners.pdf
�
So, refresh my memory. Some women won't vote this year because-
-why, exactly? We have carpool duties? We have to get to work?
Our vote doesn't matter? It's raining?
Last week, I went to a sparsely attended screening of HBO's new
movie 'Iron Jawed Angels.' It is a graphic depiction of the battle
these women waged so that I could pull the curtain at the polling
booth and have my say. I am ashamed to say I needed the reminder.
All these years later, voter registration is still my passion. But the
actual act of voting had become less personal for me, more rote.
Frankly, voting often felt more like an obligation than a privilege.
Sometimes it was inconvenient.
My friend Wendy, who is my age and studied women's history,
saw the HBO movie, too. When she stopped by my desk to talk
about it, she looked angry. She was--with herself. 'One thought
kept coming back to me as I watched that movie,' she said.
'What would those women think of the way I use, or don't use,
my right to vote? All of us take it for granted now, not just
younger women, but those of us who did seek to learn.' The
right to vote, she said, had become valuable to her 'all over again.'
HBO released the movie on video and DVD . I wish all history,
social studies and government teachers would include the movie in
their curriculum I want it shown on Bunco night, too, and anywhere
else women gather. I realize this isn't our usual idea of socializing,
but we are not voting in the numbers that we should be, and I think
a little shock therapy is in order.
It is jarring to watch Woodrow Wilson and his cronies try to persuade a psychiatrist to declare Alice Paul insane so that she could be permanently institutionalized. And it is inspiring to watch the doctor refuse. Alice Paul was strong, he said, and brave. That didn't make her crazy.
The doctor admonished the men: 'Courage in women is often mistaken for insanity.'
Please, if you are so inclined, pass this on to all the women you know.
We need to get out and vote and use this right that was fought so
hard for by these very courageous women. Whether you vote democratic, republican or independent party - remember to vote.
History is being made.
Read more:
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/suffrage/nwp/tactics.html
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/suffrage/nwp/brftime3.html
�
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9/9/2008, 2:39 pm
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friendlysolarflare
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9/10/2008, 1:36 am
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friendlysolarflare
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Re: Get Out And Vote
A very moving story, indeed.
What I don't understand is why you have to register to vote. In Denmark it works like this: as soon as a person turns 18, he/she has the right to vote. When there's an election, all of us receives a card telling us which polling station to go to on election day. It's that simple.
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9/10/2008, 3:15 am
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Doctor Delia
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Re: Get Out And Vote
Sadly we don't have universal suffrage in this country, Flare. Voter registration is used in this country to determine who can vote and who can't. And this strategy has been used to affect the outcome of elections for many years. This practice still goes on today. For example, in the state of Florida, many people were disqualified and turned away from the polling places because they had criminal records (even though they had served their time and therefore should have been eligible to vote.) This was done to decrease the votes for the Democratic Party and by the time these people realized that they did indeed have the right to vote, the election was over and Bush won.
I hate this country sometimes.
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9/11/2008, 4:43 pm
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friendlysolarflare
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Re: Get Out And Vote
quote:
Doctor Delia wrote:
For example, in the state of Florida, many people were disqualified and turned away from the polling places because they had criminal records (even though they had served their time and therefore should have been eligible to vote.)
Isn't that... uhm... illegal? 
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9/11/2008, 9:00 pm
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Doctor Delia
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Re: Get Out And Vote
Many things the Bush crime family do are illegal! There are too many to list here but just regarding crooked elections:
Voter intimidation: Law enforcement officials or people pretending to be law enforcement officials would call people up before the election and threaten them with arrest!
Disqualifying voters with criminal records, students, minorities and anyone else they don't like in the name of preventing "voter fraud" (I just heard a news story about this on national Public Radio yesterday! They talked about this problem as if it's just everyday life in America. So I'm not some wild conspiracy theorist.)
"Losing" ballots
Tampering with electronic voting machines. This is the scariest crime of all; as there is no paper trail the vote can never be checked.
Redrawing election districts (gerrymandering)
Using the Supreme Court to stop the voter recount after the 2000 election. (Al gore actually won both the popular and the electoral vote when the results were finally tallied! The 2000 presidential election was stolen!)
After Bush was elected for a second term (which was surprising since it seemed that John Kerry was leading in the exit polls, and they had never been wrong before) Europeans asked, "How can Americans be so stupid?" We're not, I think this election was "fixed" as well. Mostly through electronic vote tampering.
I used to think that sadly we in the US lived in a corrupt Third World country with money! Now with all the economic turmoil here we just live in a Third World country! But people in a corrupt nation at least have the benefit of knowing that they live in a corrupt nation. We on the other hand must endure the constant propaganda that comes out of the TV telling us what a great and wonderful and free place America is.
I guess that as long as you don't try to wake up from the Matrix of vacuous consumerism you will do well here. But for those of us who have woken up it's just a mild chronic nightmare.
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9/13/2008, 3:42 am
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friendlysolarflare
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Re: Get Out And Vote
I had no idea it was that bad in regard to the crooked elections. It's all very scary - you are supposed to live in a democracy, not some banana republic. I fully understand why you think of it as a mild nightmare 
I don't like the idea of electronic voting machines at all - they can be tampered with and as you say: no one can prove anything afterwords.
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9/13/2008, 4:30 am
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ButMadNNW
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Re: Get Out And Vote
The electronic voting machines I've used did produce a paper trail. They also gave you at least three chances to double-check that your entry was right, plus checking it against the printout, before final submission.
Just thought I'd mention.
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9/13/2008, 5:47 pm
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friendlysolarflare
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Re: Get Out And Vote
quote:
ButMadNNW wrote:
Just thought I'd mention.
Thank you, that's very useful information 
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9/13/2008, 11:56 pm
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