the vote
warning: your hackles may be raised. this is not history as well-intentioned people taught me in high school. it's not even history as well-intentioned people taught me in college. it's history as I read it when people were trying to convince me of something else. the vote. our most fundamental right. you and I didn't have it to begin with. most of us wouldn't have it for a long time. we didn't need it. wouldn't have known how to use it. when our Founding Fathers said "all men", they meant all men whose accumulated holdings brought them an income of over ten thousand dollars. no, not our scrawny dollars in 2016, when almost anyone can trade an hour's work for ten dollars. no, ten thousand dollars that came to you for the privilege of honoring your being on the earth, because you owned hundreds of acres that other people worked, because you owned taverns where other people worked. if you had to work for any of those ten thousand dollars, it almost disqualified you. now obviously armies didn't include many citizens. if the closest you ever came to work was to hold a dainty handkerchief over your nose when observing men at work, you damn sure weren't going to march around with a musket, or get your shoes muddy, or for heaven's sakes, get shot at! you might ride around on a pretty horse and point out where men could go to get shot at more advantageously. but if you were busy creating a country, you probably didn't even have time for that. you met in legislative halls and had serious and sometimes heated conversations. that kind of ten thousand dollars. later, after the war, when the ten-thousand-dollar men were talking about another war, people who were going to march and get dirty and get shot at hollered for the vote too. the vote was then extended to white men in the middle class, white men who had worked once but now owned shops where other people worked, but did not yet make ten thousand dollars a year for looking pretty and posing for paintings. and later, when we were burning up men so fast that we desperately needed soldiers, the vote came down to all white men. yes, that's when my ancestors became citizens, when any damn white man, dirty or clean, was allowed to vote. sigh. but it was not enough. we needed immigrants in the army, so the vote spread to men who weren't white. and people who formerly weren't good enough to be white became white. Irish men, for instance, then Polish. then criminey, when damn near all men were included in "all men", women demanded the vote. oh man! we made them fight for it. we imprisoned them, beat them, stripped them - in those days that meant removing about a dozen layers and forty yards of material, we froze them, we made them dress each other instead of having their maids help, and in the end, we capitulated. "all men" now pretty much means all men and women - except where Republicans have been able to turn back the clock a lot more than an hour or so. the vote! we need to hold it precious. it's our only claim to citizenship. without it, we're just the cetera who get et. vote!
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