What Matters Now? The Bush/Cheney Legacy

See my article published today in State of Nature.

(Note: in the version published at State of Nature, there is a paragraph on voting that reads this way:

"How could infamous atrocities and a veritable host of malignant deeds such as the mass murder of more than a million, two hundred thousand people in Iraq, egregious abandonment in New Orleans and its people in the face of Katrina, mass surveillance in felonious violation of the 1978 FISA law, brazen and unchallenged declarations by the White House that it is unaccountable to Congress, to international law, to the Constitution or to anyone at all, and on and on, be made right by anything so tame, so small, so risk-free, as what individuals do behind a closed space in a polling station for a few moments on one day in November 2008?"

I would prefer that it read in the following way given the fact that for some people, most especially black people, winning the right to vote and fighting against vicious attempts to disenfranchise them (such as police and official intimidation, disallowing their voter registration on specious grounds, dirty tricks, and far too few voting machines allocated to heavily black districts so that they must stand in line for hours and hours) means that their efforts to have their say have been a major battle. I do not want, in other words, to downplay the difficulties that blacks historically and currently face in being allowed into the voting booth in the first place (this also holds true for women's right to vote in the past). My main point in the paragraph and in the article as a whole that voting per se isn't where things are at and what needs to be done in the face of tyranny remains central:

"How could infamous atrocities and a veritable host of malignant deeds such as the mass murder of more than a million, two hundred thousand people in Iraq, egregious abandonment in New Orleans and its people in the face of Katrina, mass surveillance in felonious violation of the 1978 FISA law, brazen and unchallenged declarations by the White House that it is unaccountable to Congress, to international law, to the Constitution or to anyone at all, and on and on, be made right by what individuals do behind a closed space in a polling station for a few moments on one day in November 2008?")