In my classroom, I divide each class period up into
"must-do's" and "may-do's." When kids come in and look at
the board, they can see what assignment or challenge awaits, and what sort of
experience can be theirs if they complete the task in front of them.
Inevitably, this leads to a certain amount of whining and crying about skipping
to the fun, avoiding the work completely. There are some standard replies I
have generated over the years, many of which center on the "dessert before
dinner" model. Yes, I know what that sounds like. It is also part of
living in a world in which I routinely find kids walking onto our playground
before the day begins, eating a bag of hot chips with no real intent of going
into our cafeteria for the free breakfast program we have for half an hour
before the school day begins. Breakfast is the must do. Hot chips are the may
do. If that sounds a little like surrender, keep in mind that I do insist that
kids take their flamin' hot Cheetos to the cafeteria and eat them instead of
sprinkling toxic dust across the playground for seagulls, pigeons and other
less flight-inclined vermin to come by later to clean up after them. You have
to draw the line somewhere, right?
Sigh.
This is what came to mind when I heard that our President
was in Cleveland this past week, floating the idea of mandatory voting for
Americans. There are currently eleven countries in the world that require that
their citizens vote. There are nearly twenty more that only "require"
it by having a law on the books, like Egypt and Mexico, but they don't come
drag you out of your house and force you into the voting booth if you forget.
Or choose not to. Mandatory sounds like some sort of inoculation program, and I
guess we all know how successful that is turning out to be. One of the amusing
ironies of giving folks all this freedom is that it gives them the freedom not
to participate. In the 2014 midterm elections, less than thirty-seven percent
of the eligible voters found their way to their polling place to cast a ballot.
This minority elected a Republican majority to the Senate. Isn't that
interesting? Or inevitable? That could be why Mister Obama, wandering around
the nation's midsection found time in his busy schedule to suggest, "If
everybody voted, then it would completely change the political map in this
country." But if you force people to vote, aren't you taking away their constitutionally guaranteed right to complain bitterly about something they know nothing about? What a fascist.
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