I am rarely ever really shocked by some of the most terrible news dispatches.  I was truly shocked while watching televised pictures of planes plowing into the Trade Towers in New York.  The surprise by the compressing falling buildings was unbelievable and that was truly shocking.  I, like millions who watched through the day and on subsequent days, were numbed and were unable to do much.  It was like waiting for the second shoe to fall because this certainly must be the harbinger of what fundamentalist believers in “The Tribulation”, have been talking about.

There is a real surprise in the shocking news that thousands of Floridians are automatically disenfranchised although they have paid their debt to society.  Prison terms for felons and convicts are not over when these unfortunates have been released.  They cannot vote in elections and have no voice in the government to which they return.  The cause is laws enacted after the Civil war and was a means at that time to prevent the Yankee government from interfering with and controlling Southern elections.

In our time it means that the last presidential election saw probable Democratic voters turned away because of this century and a quarter relic of a law.  That they were Democrats who were not allowed to vote is not in question.  The poor who flock to the Democrat standard are usually those who commit the most crimes and do the most time.  When they come out of jail they have not been rehabilitated by our system and are further punished by not being allowed to return to full citizenship.

I don’t think that this is the meaning of going to jail for punishment and then having that punishment furthered after “paying the price for the crime”.  The payment is never over in this way of looking at our system and it perverts the system by making our kind of “Punishment” a crime.  We haven’t got it right; it hasn’t ever been right; and it looks like it won’t continue to be right until we take some thought and a lot of action to right the wrongs of continuing to punish crime after the payment has been made.

It isn’t only in Florida where this practice is institutional. It seems to be an Old South thing.  Disenfranchising people because they cannot read was an old practice here.  Poll taxes, which the poor could not pay, were practiced universally to get back at the North who sent carpet baggers to work with scallywags.  The South would rise again by still sitting heavily on the backs of freed slaves and disenfranchised sharecroppers who were eternally in debt to the company store.

Poverty and not-quite citizenship led to crime and crime filled prison cells with poor blacks and poor whites caught in the web of ignorance fed by a distrust of other sections of the country that prospered and regularly sent their sons to private school and corporate success.  It is about time to shake off lethargy and do something.