Welcome everyone and thank you for joining us in this virtual space to talk about voting and democracy here in New Mexico. We have a fantastic group of folks lined up to talk about their relationship to voting today, and I’m here to get the conversation started with a quick introduction to why voting matters in America. And, fortunately, the original group of rich white men who founded this country got together in Philadelphia in 1776 to write down those reasons.
So, obviously, I’m talking about the Declaration of Independence, in which America’s elite explained why they couldn’t stay part of England and wanted to found a new country, but at the heart of that is voting.
So let’s take a look at the words they wrote down.
The Declaration starts off by saying “We hold these truths to be self-evident” and then it lists a bunch of things that are so obvious you just say them and you know they are true.
So what are these self-evident truths that founded America?
“All men are created equal”
The first one is, “All men are created equal,” and that’s obviously true. Think about who wrote those words. Thomas Jefferson wrote them while being waited upon by Robert Hemmings, an enslaved man that he owned. Thomas Jefferson literally owned the bodies of other men and women while he was writing down, for all of history that “All men are created equal.”
It would take another 100 years for America to disavow slavery. And in terms of voting that got us the 15th Amendment saying that people have the right to vote even if they’re not white people. There was another 100 years of fighting the Jim Crow system, and we’re still fighting to protect the voting rights act today.
So there’s plenty to fight for, but from the very beginning we claimed as a people that all men were created equal as the first self-evident truth of America.
“They [meaning everyone] are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.”
Then there’s the second self-evident truth, “They [meaning everyone] are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.”
So our rights as human beings, you and me, they don’t depend on us granting each other these rights. They don’t depend on the government. America believes that we were born with unalienable rights that can’t be taken away. And what were these rights?
“Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
The third self-evident truth says that among these rights are “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” And that’s the most famous part of the Declaration of Independence. That’s the part that everyone knows. That makes sense because the point is that we would be able to live our lives. That we have some dignity.
Here comes the important part — how do we get there? How are these rights protected?
“Governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
The fourth self-evident truth is, that to secure these rights, “Governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
That is the second time that the document has used the word, “men”.
The first time I was so distracted by slavery that I didn’t mention that the word, “men” only describes half of us, right?
Just this year, this month actually, we celebrated the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment — Women’s voting rights. It took 150 years for America to realize and acknowledge that women have a voice worth hearing and that women should give their consent to our government.
Consent from all of us is really at the heart of the matter. That’s the whole point of America.
250 years ago, a bunch of rich, white men got together to found America. Even though they were creating a country for people like themselves. They weren’t thinking about people of color, indigenous people, women, or anyone who wasn’t rich like them.
They still realize and wrote down that it might be possible to have a country that works, to have a country that could last, if it is based on the consent of the people who are subject to the government’s power.
And I point out that the government has no more awesome power than the power to pluck you from your home and put you in a jail cell.
Yet the people experiencing that awesome power of government are denied the vote entirely.
So there’s plenty to fight for still when it comes to voting rights for people of color, women, indigenous people, incarcerated and formerly incarcerated, young people who are discouraged from showing up. Discouraged from caring in any way.
In the big picture, this country was founded on the idea that our consent matters. That’s why voting matters. That’s why we have a country. It’s the entire theory of America.
Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, and that consent comes from elections.
Read the next article in the series by Felice Garcia: https://medium.com/@olenewmexico/felice-garcia-on-voting-rights-842086cfdd53?sk=07aa2fcd976456dbbd04a8af6882ca8c
This article was written from a Facebook Live stream video OLÉ did awhile back. Feel free to visit and watch the whole video here: https://www.facebook.com/586402784803665/videos/671603016798529
