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OPINION
Sttnes
gainesvilletimes.com
Wednesday, October 31,2018
Shannon Casas Editor in Chief | 770-718-3417 | scasas@gainesvilletimes.com
Submit a letter: letters@gainesvilletimes.com
The First Amendment: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right
of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
LETTERS
If you believe in
democracy, get
out and vote
If you live in Georgia and you want a legisla
tive body that pursues liberty and justice for all,
then fulfill your duty as a citizen and vote.
The United States has a history of voter restric
tion. There was a time when people with black
skin were not permitted to vote. That changed
in the year 1870. We didn’t allow females to vote
until 1920.
Although we are now living in the 21st century,
Georgia’s legislature passed a law last year that
any voter registration that does not have an “exact
match” with the information on record, then that
person’s registration is placed on hold. Using this
law, the secretary of state placed 53,000 registrants
on hold. According to the Associated Press, Afri
can-Americans were 70 percent of that number.
Passing this “exact match” law was intended to
prevent voter fraud. Voter fraud has never been
a big issue in most states. In many other democra
cies, their governments automatically register
their legal citizens from the information already
on record from government agencies.
Liberty and justice for all suggests we don’t use
intimidation tactics to restrict voting. Yet in Ran
dolph County the government leaders considered
closing down seven of the nine voting places in the
county. In Fulton County, the commissioners were
found guilty of disenfranchising voters in both 2008
and in 2012. That doesn’t happen in a democracy.
This year in Jefferson County, a busload of
black seniors, headed toward a polling place,
were pulled off the bus by the county commis
sioner. Supposedly the act of entering a bus from
a county-sponsored senior-center event indicates
an illegal “political activity.”
However, I see hope. A recent news item
reports that a federal judge in Georgia intends
to issue an injunction communicating to election
officials that “they shall not reject any absentee
ballots due to an alleged signature mismatch.”
If we Georgians want a state that believes in a
democracy that provides liberty and justice for
all, then get out and vote. Pledging allegiance to
the U.S. means you vote.
Calvin King
Oakwood
Without individual mandate,
where exactly will funding
for insurance come from?
Recently, I’ve heard candidates who in the past
fought protecting pre-existing conditions medical
insurance come out saying they would defend it if
elected. It has become a plank in their campaign
platforms and this is a step in the right direction,
but I do not hear them defending other parts of
national health care that must survive if insurance
companies are going to provide medical insurance
policies covering pre-existing conditions.
Before the Affordable Care Act, insurance
companies restricted the sale of policies for
people with pre-existing conditions, or they were
very expensive. The policies also had lifetime
limits of coverage and when someone hit that
limit, they lost their insurance. They then had
pre-existing conditions and found it difficult or
impossible to find new coverage. This drove
many people into bankruptcy.
Insurance companies are not charities, they
are for-profit businesses. They will not sell a
product they believe will not make a profit. No
candidate can promise coverage if they create
a situation where insurance companies cannot
make money. If a loss is guaranteed, they simply
will withdraw from that market.
This comes to the third leg of the Affordable
Care Act stool. The individual mandate that
required people to purchase medical insurance
or pay a penalty was the method used to guar
antee that insurance companies could provide
medical insurance to those with pre-existing con
ditions without lifetime limits on coverage. Sell
ing medical insurance to young healthy adults
provided insurance companies a revenue stream
that helped cover the cost of more costly policies.
Congress has killed that mandate and the open
enrollment period has been reduced. If there
are not enough young healthy adults purchasing
coverage, medical insurance may not be profit
able, and if that is the case, insurance companies
will cut back on offering it. Expect most insur
ance to be sold as group insurance, which usually
includes a cross-section of ages that provide the
revenue streams to cover costs and make a profit.
When a candidate claims they will defend pre
existing conditions, they need to be asked how.
If they are against the individual mandate, they
need to explain where the needed funding will
come from. I doubt many of them have thought
that through.
Jimmy O’Neill
Cleveland
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Letters, columns and cartoons express the
opinions of the authors and not of The Times.
Competition for resources
will make world more grim
What Ralph McGill so
clearly described 60 years
ago as “the crop of things
sown” is coming in again
right before a big election,
so the human tendency is to
focus on how the mayhem of
the last week will affect the
upcoming vote.
That, sadly, is the least
of it. For many voters the
election is already over. The
murders in Kentucky and
Pennsylvania and the arrest
of the accused pipe bomber in Florida
will probably motivate some to vote who
wouldn’t have, but this year that is a
dwindling pool. History will likely view
this election as a minor detail of a longer,
grimmer harvest.
Anyone who is concerned about the
migrant caravan in southern Mexico or
shocked by the massacre the caravan
touched off in a Pittsburgh synagogue —
a description which covers the spectrum
of American political opinion — needs to
take a second, sober look at the report of
the United Nations Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change, released ear
lier this month.
Maybe 91 scientists from 40 countries
analyzed more than 6,000 scientific stud
ies and got it wrong. If they haven’t, then
the caravan which has become a politi
cal issue in this election is a mere ripple
compared to the tsunami ahead.
The report envisions a time not too far
in the future when rising sea levels and
collapsing tropical economies will make
national borders “irrelevant,” driving
waves not of thousands but millions
of refugees.
The migrants in the cara
van making its way toward
the U.S. border today are
driven by lawlessness and
poverty in the Central Ameri
can countries they are fleeing,
but these conditions will grow
far worse in a decade or so if
the report’s predictions are
accurate. It’s safe to also pre
dict that if they do, so will the
racial hatred and domestic
terrorism that marked last
week.
This is a larger threat than our politics
has shown the ability to grasp. Of the
thousands of political ads that have aired
across the United States during this cam
paign season, you’ll be hard put to find
many that mention climate change or the
catastrophes that could come with it.
In his 2015 book, “Black Earth: The
Holocaust as History and Warning,” the
historian Timothy Snyder argues that
Adolf Hitler’s antisemitism was driven by
his environmental obsessions. They were
at least interconnected. Hitler believed
that by introducing ideas of morality,
which interfered with the natural, brutal
competition between races, Jews threat
ened to extinguish the human species.
He coveted the lands to Germany’s
east because he was convinced no agri
cultural improvement could meet the
needs of a rising population.
Hitler hated the Jews not because they
didn’t mean well, but because they’d
introduced the very idea of meaning
well. Robert Bowers, the accused shooter
in the Pittsburgh synagogue massacre,
appears to have picked up the idea on an
online chat group that the Hebrew Immi
gration Aid Society is behind the migrant
caravan. This led to the twisted convic
tion that his own race was in danger of
genocide, and he had to do something
about it.
“It was not the face of villainy I thought
I’d see,” said a congregant from the Tree
of Life Synagogue who sat on the front
row for Bowers’ first court appearance
Monday, the New York Times reported.
It seldom is.
A long-haul trucker who owned his
own rig, Bowers comes off as another
of those shooters who attracts almost no
attention before committing mass mur
der. Remarkably few personal details
about him have emerged in the two days
since the shooting, but one stands out.
According to some reports, he was raised
by his grandparents and lived with his
maternal grandfather until he died three
or four years ago.
This is not the first time we’ve heard
of a shooter with few human connections
who has lost a close relative in the recent
or fairly recent past. One example is
Nikolas Cruz, the Parkland High School
shooter. His mother has been called an
enabler for allowing him to own a gun,
but he didn’t use it until a few months
after she died.
How many more alienated souls are
there out there, who but for one human
connection would be bent on bloodshed?
Tom Baxter is a veteran Georgia journalist
who writes for The Saporta Report.
TOM BAXTER
tom@saporta
report.com
"Dad says when he was
a kid, Halloween was the
scariest day of the year."
"Now he says
it's election day!"
JIM POWELL I For The Times
Hold Trump responsible for Pittsburgh
synagogue shooting? Probably not, but...
The San Diego Union-Tribune editorial board
Last week will go down as one of the
most awful in recent American history
because of the murders of 11 Jewish wor
shipers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh and
of two African-American shoppers at a
grocery store in Kentucky and the pipe
bombs mailed to at least 14 prominent
Democrats and national security figures
perceived by the “CNN sucks” crowd to
be constant critics of President Donald
Trump. These heinous acts created a
sense of a violent nation spinning out of
control. With each crime, the suspects’
hate-filled views came into sharper,
shocking focus.
Yes, as White House press secretary
Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Monday,
it’s wrong to hold the president respon
sible for the acts of deranged individu
als. But it is not wrong to hold the nation’s
leader responsible for setting a terrible
example with his constant attempts to
divide Americans. Instead of trying to act
as a unifying force, he gleefully governs
by ostracizing entire groups. Even after
the unspeakable synagogue murders,
Trump’s disavowal was overshadowed by
more vituperative rhetoric. His Monday
tweets denouncing the media as the “true
enemy of the people” were unfathomable
given the hate crimes preceding them.
This is not an excuse for the displays of
gross incivility on the left. Broad condem
nations of the tens of millions of people
who voted for Trump and harassment of
conservatives based on binary political
boundaries isn’t close to killing, but it’s
close-minded and intolerable, too. Still,
the half-hearted way Trump condemns
evil is uniquely corrosive. What he loves
above all else is belittling his critics.
That should be beneath the office of the
presidency.
Unfortunately, there is fresh evidence
that Trump is a symptom — not the cause
— of powerful forces creating upheaval
around the world.
The global wave of populist national
ism that led to Trump’s election in 2016
also led to Great Britain’s vote to leave
the European Union and to the rise of
authoritarian regimes in Turkey and
Hungary. On Sunday, Brazil elected as its
president Jair Bolsonaro. Labeled “the
Trump of the Tropics” by the media,
he openly espouses political violence to
create a Christian nationalist state. “If a
minority is against it, then move!” he said
last year. “Minorities must fit in or simply
disappear!” Disappear?
Then on Monday, German Chancellor
Angela Merkel — seen by many as the
moral leader of what might be called the
old world order — announced she would
not seek another term in office. This was
widely seen as Merkel’s acknowledgment
of her fading popularity and her struggles
to run a coalition government amid a
strong backlash to her welcoming hun
dreds of thousands of refugees.
Tribalism? Racism? A biologically
hard-wired fear of the other? However
labeled, it is increasingly clear that in
many developed nations, there are many
who prefer homogeneity to diversity —
who see new arrivals as subtracting from,
not adding to, a nation’s social and eco
nomic capital — and whose hostility is
increasingly open.
What’s also clear is that a nation
extolled as an example of a healthy
democracy must regain its way.
Here’s an idea: Far from the fringes,
there is still room for common under
standing. This can start by talking to a
neighbor or following someone on Twitter
with whom you disagree. It can continue
with avoiding inflammatory language
when discussing issues of the day and
with bipartisan support for the least toxic
politicians like Sens. Dianne Feinstein,
D-California, and Ben Sasse, R-Nebraska.
Developing empathy for people with
different views may be difficult in an era
in which technology makes it easy to live
in an echo chamber. But putting hatred
— and mutual loathing — in their place
is a start. A cancer is eating our country.
Don’t let it.
She Stines
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