Tu Quieres Con Papas?

Let’s cut to the chase. Disenfranchisement is a scary idea.

Nobody likes the thought that suddenly their voice isn’t going to be counted any more. The idea of suddenly losing the power to control your own life is effing frightening and for good reason. Disenfranchisement can so easily lead to exploitation, loss of civil liberties and exclusion from the best opportunities on offer in modern life.

Many people around the world, throughout the course of history, have killed and died over the issue; many others have never known that there was even something to be missed. Unsurprisingly, those who’ve known what its like to be one the powerless minority are frequently the most vocal supporters of expanding the franchise and including as many people as possible. Also unsurprisingly, those who’ve never not been a part of the franchise are generally the ones least inclined to be very supportive of such actions. This is hardly a shock in a system reliant upon elected representation; when numbers of votes dictate who has the power, any sensible faction would commit all available resources to monopolizing as many votes as possible.

This is true of the general electorate, of the houses of legislature…and of the members of the Supreme Court. Enter Justice nominee Sonia Sotomayor.

So why am I rambling on about the franchise and minorities? Well what the hell exactly is it you think the Elephants are so scared of? This nomination represents, in a single stroke, not one but two demographic variations from what they are comfortable with. She’s Hispanic and a woman. The combination represents a total unknown for them and the unknown, as we all know, is the single most terrifying thing in the world to a conservative. Compounding the problem is the little issue of numbers I mentioned above; there are a fixed number of seats on the bench and therefore a limited amount of power. If some of that power goes to Sotomayor and whatever it is she represents, then there must, by definition, be less available to the grey-faced, old, white men. Now you see where I’m going with this?

Having said this though, we need to be honest with ourselves; the fear of the Elephants is real. It isn’t contrived or an act. Think hard and look back to the first sentence I put up there at the top.
Its easy to disparage the angry white man as a stereotype. We see him as an ignorant, insensitive, arrogant, shot-sighted bastard. At best, comically self-defeating and at worst actively and successfully malevolent, it is far too easy to forget that there is a real person behind it with real feelings, real fears such as suddenly finding themselves disenfranchised. This is not an apology; my Caucasian brothers are dead wrong when they let themselves descend to racism, sexism or religious bigotry. This is merely an attempt to explain the mechanism driving it. It is also an attempt to point out the glaring flaw, the painfully obvious point of origin of the problem. In a word: hypocrisy.

Unlike certain right-wing leaders, I will not make a claim of being able (or even willing) to read the minds of a collection of Enlightenment scholars and diplomats who’ve been dead for 200 years. It may well be that they were all a pack of small-minded, misogynistic racists and bigots; I choose to think better of them and believe that, despite the practical realities of the time, they really meant for all men (as a species, not a gender) to be equals. The work they left us certainly seems to back me in this. What is inescapable however is that we, their inheritors, have failed to uphold such an ideal and that is why the Elephants are afraid and have been for so long. A long legacy of disenfranchisement of the minorities has lead them to believe, perhaps rightly, that such their fate.

The fallacy of this line of thinking is obvious but seems feeble in the face of far more visceral fear. The argument from the Elephants is that somebody has to hold the lash and they are far happier being the ones doing the holding. They cannot, emotionally, grasp the idea that we can throw it away.