As I may have mentioned before, my personal deadline for submitting columns is noon on Tuesday, so I wasn’t able to comment on last week’s election in last Thursday’s column. I’ve never before seen such an effort from so many people to set records for the lowest common denominator. Half truths became lies, lies became half truths, we saw it all … repeated ad nauseam on our TV sets.
Republicans are pleased because they maintained control of our nation’s Senate, but only one-third of the nation’s senators were up for re-election. Another third go on the block in two years and the final third will be fighting to keep their jobs two years after that. Of course, our President has a shot at re-election in two years, so we’ll see whether or not he can repeat his feat of losing the popular vote, but winning the election via the Electoral College.
I’m saddest at the loss of Initiative No. 1631 which would have decreased the amount of pollution emitted by the burning of fossil fuel. Although Governor Inslee did allude to it briefly in his ad, in my biased version of the campaign, the proponents of 1631 should have highlighted — repeatedly — the half truth put forth by the opposition that some of the major producers of greenhouse gas were excused from complying with this measure only because those companies (which include TransAlta) had already signed agreements to diminish or eliminate their output of those gasses.
And, constantly, opponents seem to have promoted the belief that everything we need to buy in order to stay alive would increase in cost and, in the TV ads, the word “tax” was often displayed in the largest letters the screen could hold. And in the brightest colors, too.
The people spending all the money to defeat these measures aren’t going to be the ones affected by this initiative’s loss. They can always escape to their property on one of the islands in the Caribbean. I wonder if they realize that they won’t be able to escape what they’ve put in motion. Being, at times, an impractical dreamer, I can’t stop wondering if the money spent by the power companies on their TV ads to defeat the initiative had been applied towards making the corrections needed it might have … oh, forget it.
Then, there was the Rossi-Schrier campaign. I want to hope there’ll never be another one like it, but I fear it may only set a new standard. It may not have been in every Rossi ad but constant reference was made that Schrier would somehow be able to enact a state income tax. I found myself wishing that her campaign would bring out the fact that whoever thought a U.S. Representative could somehow enact a state income tax was too stupid to represent us in “the other” Washington. Fortunately, enough voters in the district seem to have gotten the message anyway and temporarily crossed party lines.
The initiative on limited gun access, 1639, came out as I suspected and hoped it would: Lewis County voted against it but the rest of the state furnished enough votes to pass it. If it only saves one life, it’s worth it.
Finally, a comparison of what happened in the past to what might happen in our future kept me awake one recent night. Does it frighten you that, in the late teen years of the last century in Europe most Germans, originally, thought Hitler was a joke, just as a large percentage of our country considers our President to be? After that, responding to emergency “crisis” like the burning of the Reichstag, the Army and the other military forces, gradually, transferred their allegiance to a newly formed government and all signs of a democracy went out the window. Has President Trump been reading “Mein Kampf,” or having someone read it to him?
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Bill Moeller is a former entertainer, mayor, bookstore owner, city council member, paratrooper and pilot living in Centralia. He can be reached at bookmaven321@comcast.net.
