Honor America Today. She's Worth It

Rock the vote. It's never mattered more

OUR RIGHT TO VOTE is not in the Constitution. Other than in the 15th Amendment — adopted in 1870 to guarantee voting rights to African-American men — nowhere is it written that our vote is legally protected.

Snopes.com:

If you’re looking for the right to vote, you won’t find it in the United States Constitution or the Bill of Rights.

The Bill of Rights recognizes the core rights of citizens in a democracy, including freedom of religion, speech, press and assembly. It then recognizes several insurance policies against an abusive government that would attempt to limit these liberties: weapons; the privacy of houses and personal information; protections against false criminal prosecution or repressive civil trials; and limits on excessive punishments by the government.

But the framers of the Constitution never mentioned a right to vote. They didn’t forget – they intentionally left it out. To put it most simply, the founders didn’t trust ordinary citizens to endorse the rights of others.

So, ultimately, how do we define voting if not as a Constitutionally protected right?

A privilege? A responsibility? Something broader?

I’d call it a trust. Sacred and profound, the most important thing we can do for our country. Voting is the deal we’ve made with all who came before us. Voting is not a patriotic act, not exactly. Understanding the beauty of our system and the lives lost protecting it — and acting on that understanding, day in and day out — that is the act of patriotism.

Anybody can vote if they meet the criteria. Living our convictions is the hard part. That’s where we’ve fallen short.

The vote is no longer sacred when some choose to ignore the results. It’s no longer profound when efforts are made to exclude selected voters. The meaning of “power’’ becomes warped when would-be autocrats maneuver to bend the outcomes to their liking.

Sacred becomes meaningless.

We don’t just vote for people on Election Day. We vote for ideas and beliefs. Everybody’s ideas and beliefs, at their core, should be about protecting this fragile, imperfect and vulnerable system we’ve created. Being against someone is different from trying to exclude him.

Democracy is more important than high gas prices, which are temporary. Democracy is more important than inflation which, while painful to all of us, will ebb over time. We can survive $4 gasoline and big grocery bills. We always have. We would not survive a systematic change to what our vote means.

If you went to the ballpark knowing beforehand who would win, why would you bother going?

We can’t allow conspiracy theorists, election deniers and blatant liars of all stripes to steal who we are. The folks who put power over country cannot win, if we are to keep our freedoms.

Not everyone believes we’re on the edge of something momentous. Who has time to think about democracy? We’re running out of money before we’re running out of month. We’ll worry about that problem, thank you.

We’ve had it so good in America for so long, we take it for granted. Worse, we are so devoid of real problems, we have time to create phony ones. Sixty judges said no to lawsuits contending the 2020 election was stolen. And yet, we persist with the false claims. We’re an angry nation, not a grateful one, and what do we have to be angry about compared with the rest of the world?

And yet, we’re still standing. The great experiment lives, in a country so sure of itself and what it believes in, it doesn’t have to make voting rights explicit in its Constitution.

Please don’t take this for granted. Take the time to think your vote through. Protect all it stands for. It can go away.

Now, then. . .

MAYBE THE DUMBEST EXPRESSION EVER UTTERED IN SPORTS. . . I don’t know who came up with the term “hater’’ in connection with our fun-n-games. That person had no idea what a powerful word that is, or any idea what real hate looks like.

And yet it persists. Here was the question asked of Joe Mixon in the post-game presser, after Mixon scored five TDs Sunday:

How good does it feel though to prove your haters wrong today?

OK. It seems too obvious to say nobody “hates’’ Joe Mixon. Not in the accurate and literal sense of the word. Fans have been disappointed with him. Fans have wondered about his future, fans have suggested he isn’t the player he once was. But I’ll go way out on a limb here and guess no rational person “hates’’ an athlete for the mere act of underperforming. That’s just stupid.

I also understand that sometimes media folks will frame a question to make it sound as if they’re hip, or in some way connected to the person they’re interrogating. Um, they’re not.

Ask smart questions. Don’t demean the person by pandering to him with the mindless use of a word such as “hater’’. Thank you.

THE RAVENS, ROLLING. . . They didn’t have Mark Andrews. Gus Edwards or JK Dobbins. Arguably their best receiver in Nawlins last night — DeSean Jackson — is a 35-year-old they signed to the practice squad in October. They made it look easy against the Saints.

Lamar Jackson remains a force of nature and an overlooked MVP candidate. John Harbaugh’s coaching chops and temperament have guided the Ravens past what could have been three soul-crushing losses early on. They added a Pro Bowl-type LB in Roquan Smith, who was all over the field Monday.

Their defense is playing the way its talent says it should.

The Bengals road to the postseason is going to be Wild.

TUNE O’ THE DAY. . . Spent a delightful hour with my iTunes yesterday. I still make the occasional trek to Everybody’s Records, because I still love the richness of the vinyl sound and the pleasurable noise made by records being flipped through a stack. But when it comes to Playlists, nothing beats the digital way.

Here’s a playlist I made yesterday, of old soul and R-and-B. See how many of these tunes you recognize:

Green Onions, Time Is Tight, Mo’ Onions, Groovin’ and Hang ‘Em High — Booker T and the MGs;

Soul Man, Hold On, I’m Comin’ , I Thank You and Soothe Me — Sam and Dave;

Come Together and Sara Smile — Stacy Mitchart';

Baby Make Your Own Sweet Music — Jay and the Techniques;

I’m Your Puppet — James and Bobby Purify;

Love Makes a Woman — Barbara Acklin;

And this one. If you hear this and don’t start shimmyin’, you’re clinically dead.