Thank you for publishing Martin Ramsey's wonderfully succinct and well-reasoned letter "No Borders" [July 20 Xpress]. Given the ever more polarized and vocal ravings, both locally and nationally, of the self-centered, greedy, ignorant, delusional and immature, and their championing of right wing “causes” that are utterly opposite to their own best interest (due in no small part to decades of public-education cuts, thus successfully fostering an easily manipulated, uninformed power base, whose zealousness can be choreographed by the likes of Rupert Murdoch, Fox News and their henchmen, the Tea Party). It would seem we need a simple thing to renew the brightest aspirations of this country, as well as to again make ignoble and base what has become so edified and predominate in blatant corporate greed and venality.
We need a basic intelligence test before one can wield the power of voting. As the right-wing pundits of the Tea Party have so aptly demonstrated, the poor things don't know the difference between a horse's butt and a freezer, causing everyone's ice cream to melt in a big hurry.
Do yourself a favor and check out http://www.AmericansElect.org. Let's do away with the Republicans and Democrats and have a middle class again.
— Anderson Long
Alexander
“We need a basic intelligence test before one can wield the power of voting.”
How is this any different from the infamous Literacy Tests promoted by racist, white, pre-civil-rights southern Democrats of the 1950s-early 60s to keep the uneducated (read: black) voters from corrupting their pristine (white) electoral system?
What did the middle class ever do except raise a bunch of bratty kids and buy televisions and toaster ovens?
I’m not sure that i consider the modicum of security and wealth generated from the crumbs of industry the pinnacle of working class achievement, especially when, as a whole, that ‘middle class’ did little to advance any real foothold for other financial and ethnic classes behind their own on the ladder.
Our great grandparents farmed dirt. Our grandparents fought in a war. We won the war and our parents got the spoils. The spoils are basically all gone. We go back to farming dirt. Hopefully our kids turn out better than those baby boomer products of middle class ennui.