EDITORS CAN BE FUNNY
Writing is a flawed art. And if you take your mistakes personally, you’ll become creatively paralyzed which is why I so much appreciated a piece in a recent Barbara Bernard article in The Republican that my wife and editor brought to my attention at a timely moment. Bernard wrote: “There is a story about a husband who received a text from his wife which read, ‘Your the love of my life. I adore you. I will do anything for you.’ He sent a text back which read, ‘You’re the love of my life. I adore you. I will do anything for you.’ From that day forward his wife cooked him gourmet dinners, gave him back rubs and waited on him hand and foot. He is still wondering if he should tell her the message he sent back was just to correct her misspelled ‘your’ when it should have been ‘you’re.’” I got an extended laugh at the joke and at the fact that my editor called it to my attention because I had just reread a “bit” I had written in the September issue of Point of View about the Harambee in which I had written about an article in The Republican: “All of us Hurst’s got a big laugh out of the misrepresentations.” Of course “Hurst’s” should have been “Hursts.” But because I made the error and my editor didn’t catch it before we went to print, there were no consequences between us, good or bad. (Of course, neither of us would have waited on the other hand and foot anyway.)

REPUBLICAN SHORTSIGHTEDNESS
Just as I suspected would eventually happen, Republicans who have passed voter restriction laws in 24 states are starting to wake up to their own folly. “The 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study data found that voters 65 and older and white, non-Hispanic voters – groups that tend to vote Republican – were more likely to use mail-in voting than the nation as a whole.” Yet, Republicans in state legislatures passed 40 new rules aimed at absentee and mail-in voting alone and one Republican in Florida “worried that the new laws could rile voters of color and turn them out in greater numbers.” A Texas Republican legislator “openly wondered why the legislators were “trying to make it harder for Republican voters to vote?” An Iowa Republican election commissioner “asked the same thing at a hearing on new voter rules in the state.” And in Michigan, Justin Roebuck, the Republican co-chair of the Michigan County Clerks Legislative Committee, raised concerns about the impact of some of the new proposals.” Michigan Republican concerns also involved new laws requiring voter ID and restrictions on drop boxes that would impact hours when 20% of ballots come in. (See The Wall Street Journal, September 20, 2021) I can imagine that Republicans across the country are slowly waking up to the fact that they may be designing their own demise in pursuit of a nonexistent election problem sold to them as reality by Trump’s “big lie” of election fraud. Some were duped. But most knew better and simply saw an opportunity to steal future elections for Republicans. All of them, in their blind haste, adopted laws that they may soon regret, which also includes the broad opposition from those of us who intend not only to vote in large numbers but to also fight the new laws.

THE CALIFORNIA RECALL ELECTION THAT WASN’T
I never could figure out why Californians were so upset about their governor, Gavin Newsom, that they felt it necessary to hold a recall election to remove him from office before his term ended. But according to an editorial in The Wall Street Journal (September 16, 2021), “The polling was close when Mr. Newsom was running against his own record.” According to the editorial, “Mr. Newsom seemed vulnerable for a time given his many failures – forest mismanagement, energy blackouts, rampant homelessness and rising urban crime, hypocrisy on Covid lockdowns, housing prices that drive out the middle class, and other quality-of-life issues….But California is overwhelmingly Democratic, and Mr. Newsom turned the election into a referendum on the alternatives. He ran a relentlessly negative campaign against Larry Elder, the conservative (Black) radio show host who emerged as the leading GOP candidate.” The essence of Newsom’s attacks against Elder was that “he was a front man for (Donald) Trump.” And it worked. Listen up Democrats!

BLACK LEADERS RETHINKING REDISTRICTING
According to The Wall Street Journal writer Aaron Zitner, “Black leaders are approaching this process (of redistricting) with a different mind-set than a decade ago, with more arguing that Black political representation no longer rests on a need to pack Black voters into highly concentrated districts.” (September 9, 2021) Of course, we all must be more than a little cautious when a Wall Street Journal writer suggests changing any Black folks’ civil rights gains from past years, especially those that gave us gains in the political arena. But Zitner’s point is well taken since it has become well known that a large part of Republican strategy has become to weaken the Democratic vote through redistricting that concentrates the Black vote in special Black districts for the singular purpose of creating all-white adjacent districts that are more inclined to favor Republicans at a time when it is becoming clear that White voters in mixed districts are much more inclined to vote for Black candidates than in the past.

BAD NEWS―GOOD NEWS
The bad news is that justice was unnecessarily delayed for Ahmaud Arbery, the Black jogger who was murdered by three White men in Georgia while simply jogging down a street in a white part of town in February of 2020. The good news is that former Georgia prosecutor Jackie Johnson was just indicted on charges of “violating her oath of office and hindering a law enforcement officer” by deliberately causing a delay in the initial investigation that led to a failure even to arrest McMichael and his son and a White neighbor who assisted in Arbery’s murder. As it turned out, Greg McMichael, one of the trio, was a retired investigator from the office of the prosecutor who delayed the arrest of all three men for two months until the Georgia Bureau of Investigation took over the case in response to nationwide public outcry.

GOOD NEWS
A Colorado grand jury indicted two current police officers, one former officer and two fire-department paramedics on 32 charges including manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide and various other charges for the death of Elijah McClain, the Black twenty-three year old who was merely walking back to his home from a trip to the store.

“A statue honoring Buffalo Soldiers was unveiled at the U.S. Military Academy, 114 years after they arrived at the then-segregated academy to teach horsemanship to white cadets.” (The Wall Street Journal, September 21, 2021) It’s about time.

IT’S ABOUT TIME
“Now, after years of debate, a new statue will be erected in Greenwood (Mississippi) – one of Emmett Till, the Black 14-year-old brutally beaten and shot in 1955 by white men 10 miles from the city. The likeness of Till, whose death is still under federal investigation, will be one of only a handful of statues of African Americans in Mississippi, where dozens of Confederate monuments dot the landscape at courthouses, town squares and other prominent locations.” (The Boston Globe, August 9,2021) It’s about time.

THE CANNABIS INSPECTOR FROM NEWTON
I just thought it was ironic that Springfield’s Mayor Domenic Sarno saw fit to go outside of Springfield to hire a marijuana inspector from way up by Boston in Newton, Massachusetts, while refusing to search beyond the Springfield police ranks to look for the best possible police commissioner for Springfield.

SPEAKING OF MAYOR SARNO…
The problem with favoritism is that sometimes those who practice it get caught. By now Mayor Sarno should know that giving merit pay up to $5,000 to his most favored people first and leaving those most deserving for last, if at all, is a bad political recipe. Thanks to a trio of dedicated city councilors, Sarno is now stumbling over himself trying to catch up and save face but it will not be easy as evidenced by the following email to one of the three councilors from a police department custodian who labored on the front lines throughout the pandemic.
“Good morning sir. I’m a custodian at the Springfield police headquarters. I’m contacting you today because of the issue we are having about the mayor to sit down with our union to discuss this merit pay situation. Especially working at the police department during covid was not an easy task with having to deal with all they came in contact with. Officers getting sick and we’d run right in to clean it up so others wouldn’t get sick as well. The gratitude the city has shown us is really unacceptable. The union asked the mayor 2 times to sit down and discuss the merit pay and the mayor declined. People that were working from home or isolated in offices had no problem getting there merit bonus. Being on the front lines of fighting covid I guess pushes you to the back of the line in merit pay and that’s pretty disgusting. We risked our health for the city and they have shown zero appreciation in return. We feel worthless about how everything has played out.”

As I said, the problem with favoritism is that sometimes those who practice it get caught.

WHO BELIEVED OTHERWISE EXCEPT FOR A “FEW” REPUBLICAN FOOLS
So the Arizona audit of the 2020 election run by Republican party patrons has revealed, after months and months of stupidity, that Trump, indeed, lost in Arizona and President Joe Biden won by an even wider margin (300 additional votes). The only remaining question is whether the 78% (as of the last poll) of Republicans who still believe Trump won smarten up and finally face the fact that Trump lost the 2020 election or will they continue to be stupid? ■