Dying to vote
McCarthy, Abigail
truggles for the vote---for the enfranchisement of every citizen--have marked the history of the twentieth century. In the early 1900s there was the protracted battle for women's...
...What has caused this decline in engagement...
...For a one-month period, the program matches elected officials with someone on welfare...
...The Nunn report urges every citizen to commit to participation in a local or neighborhood group that has a problem-solving agenda for the local community...
...Curtis Gans, director of the committee, says of this dismaying fact: "The problem we have is not procedural but motivational, and there is no quick fix for what ails the American political system...
...That means they have too little left to cover food, clothes, transportation, child care, and medical costs...
...But eventually they won...
...Midcentury brought the strenuous push for civil rights that culminated in the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965...
...Television is a powerful isolating distraction, absorbing hour after hour of time that could be far better used...
...Obviously, that system is in trouble...
...They were going to get rid of everything that he hated about Alabama and Mississippi-the literacy tests, the poll tax, the hundreds of cruel ways in which blacks were suppressed, first and foremost by denying them the vote" [italics mine...
...While 15 million poor households qualified for federal housing assistance last year, for lack of federal funding only 4.5 million received it...
...To put flesh on these statistics, I recently volunteered with the Walk a Mile program...
...For affordable housing strengthens both families and neighborhoods by promoting individual responsibility and job opportunities...
...The vote was key and precious...
...Halberstam, at the time a twenty-fiveyear-old reporter assigned to cover the story, writes of Lewis's response to President Lyndon Johnson's announcement of the voters' rights acts that Johnson intended to send to Congress: "One man, one vote...
...Each study confirmed, in one way or another, a steady decline in voter turnout...
...Unfortunately, the study shows, these changes have had little effect...
...According to the report, only an effort at restoring the conditions which effected healthy turnout between the 1930s and the mid-1960s: "...a commitment to developing the person as a citizen...
...Voting, according to the report, is and has been the lowest-common-denominator political act--those who don't vote do not participate in any other form of "socially engaged or political activity...
...And whereas Habitat and other nonprofit housing groups have built more than 450,000 units across the country since 1986, it would take over a hundred years at that rate to provide affordable homes for just 5 million of the most impoverished households in America...
...It is, alas, true that, as Gans concluded his committee's report: "It is time to recognize that the democracy which may be in the most trouble is the one which prides itself on being the world's greatest...
...During winter months they must decide whether to "eat or heat...
...Carter joined hundreds of volunteers in a seven-day Habitat for Humanity blitz that built 155 houses in central Appalachia...
...Her monthly rent, $425, does not include utilities...
...Commonweal 8 August14,1998...
...In fact, they may have had an inverse result...
...This conclusion was reached on the basis of four studies made by the committee: a study of recent statewide primary turnout, a summary study of the 1996 general election, an analysis of census data from recent elections, and a study of the impact of procedural reforms on turnout...
...But for millions of Americans, spending half or more of their incomes on shelter is the rule...
...And the situation is not likely to improve as the cost of housing increases nationally, the wages of lowincome families remain stagnant, and the federal government continues its retreat from replenishing housing stock...
...But as impressive as this achievement is, it is a drop in the bucket when it comes to meeting the housing needs of 27 million poor Americans...
...a politics governed by minimal bounds of civility, comity and common purpose...
...What can reverse the decline...
...The report answers: "The fragmentation of our society by television and, increasingly, the computer...
...These are David Halberstam's The Children (Random House), and Walking with the Wind (Simon and Schuster), the memoir of Congressman John Lewis (D-Ga...
...who almost lost his life twice from severe beatings--once as a Freedom Rider and four years later in the march on Selma...
...It behooves each of us to give this serious thought...
...major and central mobilizing issues...
...According to current federal guidelines, the cost of a family's housing should amount to less than 30 percent of household income...
...Two other reports suggest how this may be possible but extremely difficult...
...So the Habitat volunteers built modest frame homes on the hillsides and in the hollows...
...Both reports endorse active citizenship as a part of every young person's education--for example, doing volunteer work at social agencies...
...Both reports insist that it is only by becoming active participants in civic life that a genuine sense of empowerment and trust is likely to be reestablished...
...In the early 1900s there was the protracted battle for women's suffrage...
...And Washington Post political columnist David Broder has pointed out the weakness in the emphasis on student civic education: "But youngsters learn by example, and both reports are candid about the difficulty of jarring millions of us adults out of our lethargy and cynicism...
...At an estimated $100 per month for the latter, total housing costs consume 48 percent of this woman's income, more than twice the national average...
...and a general belief in the honor of the political enterprise...
...My match was a recently divorced mother of seven who works full time at $7.15 an hour...
...The general election of 1996 had the lowest turnout since 1924, and, outside the South, the lowest since 1824...
...The report gives examples of thousands of community and religious groups doing just that...
...Whether these approaches will succeed in raising the level of political awareness and engagement is a question...
...Thousands of families in the region live in substandard houses or in units they cannot afford...
...Leaders suffered ridicule and opprobrium, even imprisonment and brutal treab ment, for advancing their cause...
...we have it now, Lewis thought...
...The temptation to blame o t h e r s - - t h e government, the politicians, the interests--is enormous...
...In the past, the Center for the Study of the American Electorate has tried to increase turnout by sponsoring changes in election and voter procedures, such as the motor-voter law...
...The story of the struggle to gain it was "an example of democracy at work because of the courage and nobility of ordinary people," says Halberstam...
...Two books published this year remind us of the depth and strength of that movement, of lives lost and the terrible beatings endured by the advocates of nonviolence who led it...
...It comes as a real shock then to read in a report from the nonpartisan Committee for the Study of the American Electorate that today the right to vote is so little valued that 120 million of those eligible may not exercise that right in the next national election...
...The National Commission on Civic Renewal-chaired by former Senator Sam Nunn, a Democrat, and William J. Bennett, former secretary of education and a Republican--has issued ' ~ Nation of Spectators," while the Kettering FounCommonweal 7 August 14, 1998 dation has funded another, "Governing America: Our Choices, Our Challenge...
...What is needed to address the situation is a sustained, wellfinanced government/private-sector campaign...
...a media committed to informing...
...There was also the less-controversial effort to secure voting rights for eighteen-year-olds: "old enough to fight for the country, old enough to vote...
...Director Gans notes that there is no evidence that volunteer work stimulates political action...
...Her yearly take-home pay including welfare benefits is about $13,000...
...Jim Wayne AFFORDABLE HOUSING A state rep shows how ormer President Jimmy Carter swings a big hammer...
...According to the Wall Street Journal (June 17), low-income housing is in such short supply that there are nearly two families competing for every affordable unit...
...the decline of integrating institutions and the undermining of community...
...Since 1976, Habitat has constructed over 65,000 such homes...
...The Walk a Mile program helped me to see how damaging the scarcity of decent, affordable housing is to such families, and, by expansion, to whole communities...
...He proved it to me last year in the mountains of Kentucky...
Vol. 125 • August 1998 • No. 14
