Keep Right — Column by Ralph K. Ginorio
When this column publishes, it will be Election Day 2025. Certainly, it is not as dramatic as that day one year ago when Americans took back our government from an autopen and it’s questionably elected, aged figurehead.
Nevertheless, this municipal election offers each citizen yet one more opportunity to express who we want to be and what we stand for through our vote. Once more, we can consent to who will govern us and according to what philosophy.
Martin Luther King frequently quoted Dante in stating that that the hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who, in times of great moral conflict, maintain their neutrality. My fellow American citizens, none of us have any right to remain above the fray in these deeply consequential times!
We are involved! Abraham Lincoln, a President who knew consequential times like few others, was correct in saying that, “We shall nobly save or meanly lose this last best hope of Earth”. As in his troubled time, our Republic hangs in the balance.
As the 1970s Canadian rock band “RUSH” once sang, “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice!” It is tempting to look askance at those wrestling in the pit, covered with sweat and the smell of desperation, and say, “A pox on both your houses!”
Such a pretense of being above the fray may feed one’s vanity by asserting a sense of oneself as being too dignified to struggle and too secure to fear any outcome. None of these delusions are true.
Fighting may be unseemly in form and uncertain in result. We might fight all-out and still be defeated. Then what? We are exhausted and beaten as we face what comes next. The problem with this stance is that if we do not fight with all our might, then we may maintain our “cool”. But, we will have allowed our opponent to prevail because we didn’t want to get our hair tousled.
Those who try to practice a faux-Buddhist detachment and refuse to engage with the ongoing and existential struggles of life give victory to the enemy. Edmund Burke rightly wrote that, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
We are all here, in this specific moment with its many challenges. We have been placed here by God, by fate, or by random chance. Regardless, we are here, now. We can to do our part to help shape the outcome of today’s struggles for our American soul.
I speak in grandiloquent fashion because this civic duty of exercising our franchise is genuinely full of drama. Every day, and in every way, the world is being changed by people just like you and me. An isolated individual can win a fight with City Hall. A solitary citizen can determine the very fate of the world.
Responsibility for our ongoing freedom remains where it has always been, in our own hands. It is up to every one of us to do our duty and carry our burden of responsibility with grace and wisdom for the sake of the future.
How can I speak so hyperbolically with a straight face? After all, we are really just voting locally for Mayors and School Board Members! We are not determining nuclear policies or matters of war and peace. We are not even electing those who will decide such issues.
True. But elections are more than a means of determining precisely how many citizens vote for each candidate. Our choices determine political momentum. Which political philosophy is ascendant in the hearts of minds of American citizens? This can only be truly determined on Election Day.
In my judgment, this is what is at stake. Will we give strength to tyranny by withholding our vote or by voting self-indulgently or sentimentally? Will we embolden demagogues who tell the people what they want to hear in order to secure the power necessary to defraud those very same voters when in power?
Will we go down the road to self-destruction that Europe, Blue States, and Blue Cities have travelled? Will North Idaho embrace government restrictions on all personal choices, except for those of a sexual nature? Will we accept the thorough censorship of all expression that dissents from the ruling elites’ dogmas?
Will we establish an officially-sanctioned indulgence of culturally unassimilated and lawless street thugs, whose violations are permitted because they are from a variety of protected and formerly disenfranchised classes of people? Will we consent to the endless expansion of governmental meddling into every aspect of our lives?
This is the future that we see made manifest from Paris to Philadelphia, from London to Los Angeles. This is what local Democrats quietly crave, and what moderate Republicans will pusillanimously abide; nothing less than the systematic demolition of Western Civilization and its replacement with a totalitarian dystopia.
Isn’t this “crazy talk”? Sadly, in my judgment it is the nature of our historical moment that such hyperbolic warnings are rooted more in realty than in rhetoric. Then again, this is merely one fellow’s opinion.
Whatever your convictions, step up my fellow citizens and today vote your conscience!
