You Get What You Vote For...As Well as the Consequences When You Don't

Nevada held its primary two days ago. Voter turnout, statewide, was 20%.

What do you suppose it might take for Americans to understand the criticality of their involvement in their world?

Let's see. I guess these little matters didn't do it:

Our children, and others' children, dying needlessly in Iraq,

People from here and away being held against their will and without recourse in Guantanamo,

The inalienable right of habeas corpus now alienated,

Gas resting at $4 a gallon while oil companies roar with laughter,

Countries around the world having passed the stage of incredulity at a president supremely ill-suited for power,

An education system bound inexorably toward the voucher system as No Child Left Behind creeps to its goal,

Larger and larger swaths of the population joining the ranks of the homeless,

Veterans neglected by an administration that is incapable of understanding the lifelong debt owed to the individuals who offered up their lives for lies,

Americans now left with no alternatives in the political process as the parties have become indistinguishable in their corruptness, self-aggrandizement, and heedless pursuit of their own private agendas,

More and more species of wildlife and tracts of land tossed off the preservation lists,

Crime after crime committed by public officials who sneer at the idea of answering to the citizens who put them there...

And no wonder they sneer. They know their careening, crashing, cataclysmic foray through the Constitution, our pocketbooks, our wildlands, and our honor will never be halted when 20% of the populace votes.