As I stated in my blog post about rugged individualism, “To my way of thinking, the United States of America is the greatest country that has ever existed. But it’s not without its flaws.” What flaws, a reader asks. Let me run through my list of perennial favorites.
Failure to address climate change. The world, including the U.S., is rushing toward disaster. As world climate becomes warmer and warmer, we fail to reduce the human activities that produce warmer weather. We reached our all-time low under the Trump administration. President Biden is finally taking initial steps to remedy the situation.
Two Senators per state. Both Wyoming (the state with the smallest population, 580,000) and California (the state with the largest population, nearly 40 million) have two Senators in the U.S. Senate. Wyoming’s population is more than 90 percent white, and its politics overwhelmingly Republican. Because it has as many Senators as California, its tiny conservative population is able to nullify California’s progressive multiracial majority.
Voting restrictions. Wikipedia reports that, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, as of March 24, 2021, Republicans, reacting to their losses in the 2020 election, have introduced more than 361 bills in 47 states that would restrict voting access. Most are aimed at limiting mail-in voting, strengthening voter ID laws, shortening early voting, eliminating automatic and same-day voter registration, curbing the use of ballot drop boxes, and allowing for more aggressive means to remove people from voter rolls. The Washington Post described the effort as “potentially amounting to the most sweeping contraction of ballot access in the United States since the end of Reconstruction.”
More next time.
Tom Glenn, Writer 