November 25, 2015 Page 7 Opinion articles do not necessarily represent the views of the Portland Observer. We welcome reader essays, photos and story ideas. Submit to news@portlandobserver.com. O PINION Cynical Attempts to Blunt Our Political Power Turing back the clock on voting rights by m arian W right e delman Barbara Arn- wine has long been sounding the alarm about 21st century efforts to turn back the clock on voting rights. She re- cently founded the Transformative Justice Coalition after serving for many years as executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and head of its Election Protection efforts, the nation’s largest non-partisan voter protection coalition. Under her leadership the Law- yers’ Committee created a “Map of Shame” highlighting states where new or pending legislation threatens to suppress the right to vote—which, as she says, remains under attack in 2015 by forces who still believe the right to vote should stay in the hands of a pre- cious few. Many of the new laws making it more difficult to vote appear to be cynical attempts to blunt the political power of rapidly growing populations of people of color as our nation confronts the changing reality of who is a “minority” and who is a “majority.” Others spe- cifically appear to target younger voters, the poor, and the elderly. Alabama made some of the latest headlines for its decision to close a wave of driver’s license of- fices in disproportionately black, rural areas in October, leaving eight out of the 10 counties with the highest percentage of non-white registered voters without a Department of Mo- tor Vehicles—making it much more difficult for residents in those counties to get their li- paying fees, or going through oth- er hoops. Not even voiceless children are exempted from assault. The Chil- dren’s Defense Fund has filed a friend of the court brief in the U.S. Supreme Court case, Evenwel v. Abbott, in which some citizens are suing the state of Texas seeking to change the answer to a fundamen- tal democratic question: Who gets counted as a person when states determine proportional represen- But the Evenwel case is chal- lenging the state of Texas’s current traditional use of total population measure for redistricting in its state Senate, and seeks instead to count only citizens of voting age when drawing districts. Attacking that long-standing practice is part of a broader effort to diminish the rights of certain—especially non- white—groups and powerless groups, including children, remi- niscent of other efforts to suppress There is a constitutional principle that elected officials represent every individual in their district, including non-voters, and the majority of states currently count all people who live in a district when drawing district boundaries. censes and fulfill the state’s strict photo ID voter requirement. Voter ID laws are just one of the danger- ous new kinds of laws threaten- ing to disenfranchise voters. The problem they allegedly address, voter identity fraud, has been doc- umented to be nearly nonexistent. But people of color, immigrants, poor people, and old and young voters, including students attend- ing college away from home, are less likely to have the forms of identifications required by states’ laws and more likely to have trou- ble obtaining birth certificates, tation? There is a constitutional princi- ple that elected officials represent every individual in their district, including non-voters, and the majority of states currently count all people who live in a district when drawing district boundaries. Most people are represented di- rectly because they are voters, but those who can’t vote—children, non-citizens, formerly incarcerat- ed people who have not had their voting rights restored, and others who are disenfranchised—are all represented indirectly. voting rights. Children’s health, ed- ucation, and economic security de- pend on healthy state budgets and good public policies. Our nation has a vital stake in the well-being of its children. But all these efforts to subvert the democratic process continue and we must fight to stop them in every form. There has never been a safe time in America to drop vigilance about attempts to deny people the vote or fair legislative representation. As Frederick Douglass taught us more than 150 years ago, “Power con- cedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” Barbara Arnwine adds: “All of us have to be involved in this fight, because we are in an en- trenched battle. The United States can’t do anything about the fact that demographic change is com- ing. It’s a reality, and it’s one that we shouldn’t run from. Whoever heard of a nation being ashamed of its demographics? . . . What’s more beautiful than having people of many multiracial populations and ethnic cultures? What’s more beautiful than having the mash-up of all that, and the creativity that flows from it when we work to- gether as one? . . . This notion that it’s ‘our’ country, a ‘white coun- try,’ that notion is dead. It’s rail- ing against the wind to think you can stop it, but people think they can do a South Africa and have a minority rule a majority. That’s just ridiculous. It’s not going to happen in the 21st century. It’s not going to be tolerated. So we have a real fight for those of us who are justice-loving people. Our fight is to help our nation to transition from this really racially unjust nation that’s been for years into a much more just, equal, inclusive, and celebratory society.” Find out where your state stands—and stay vigilant, educat- ed, and ready to fight for that just, equal nation for all. Marian Wright Edelman is president of the Children’s De- fense Fund. Intervention Is the Problem, Not the Solution With military force, war begets war p eter C erto A café. A stadium. A concert hall. One of the most horrify- ing things about the murderous attacks in Paris was the terrorists’ choice of targets. They chose gathering places where people’s minds wander fur- thest from unhappy thoughts like war. And they struck on a Friday night, when many westerners take psychic refuge from the troubles of the working week. The message was simple: Wherever you are, this war will find you. The same could be said for the 43 Lebanese civilians mur- dered only the day before, when a bomb exploded in a crowded by marketplace in Beirut. Or for the 224 vacationers who died when their Russian airliner blew up over Egypt a few weeks earlier. The Islamic State, or ISIS, claimed responsibility for each of these atrocities. But that’s not the only thing they have in common. In fact, all of them occurred in coun- tries Russia started bombing ISIS targets and other Syrian rebels last month. Hundreds of Lebanese Hezbollah fighters have fought and died defending the Syrian regime. And France was the first country to join the Obama administration’s war on ISIS last year. Indeed, scarcely a month before ISIS attacked the French capital, French planes were bombing the Is- lamic State’s capital in Raqqa, Syr- ia — dropping bombs that “did not help them at all in the streets of Par- is,” as a grim communiqué from the terrorist group gloated afterward. These horrific attacks on civil- ians are part of a calculated effort to bring the war in Syria home to the other countries participating in it. And our bill could come due next. Washington’s funneling mil- lions of dollars’ worth of weapons to its proxies in Syria. It’s dis- patching special forces to “advise” an array of the Islamic State’s ene- mies. And in an air war totally un- authorized by Congress, U.S. war- planes have launched thousands of strikes on alleged ISIS targets in Iraq and Syria since 2014. But you can’t simply bomb extremism out of existence. And as governments from Moscow to Paris to Beirut are learning, you put your own people’s lives on the line when you try. Military intervention has suc- ceeded mightily in breaking things and killing people, but it’s done nothing to wind down the greatest factor fueling the rise of ISIS: Syria’s wider civil war. An international arms embargo and a deal between the Syrian regime and other rebel groups — jobs for diplomats, not drones — would go much further toward curtailing the threat of ISIS. Yet France has responded to the carnage in Paris by pounding Raqqa with yet more air strikes — reportedly bombing medical clin- ics, a museum, and a stadium of its own, among other targets. Leading U.S. presidential can- didates aren’t proposing anything smarter. Hillary Clinton declared that ISIS “must be destroyed” with “all of the tools at our disposal.” Ted Cruz called for “overwhelm- ing air power” and condemned the Obama administration for having insufficient “tolerance for civil- ian casualties.” Ben Carson called for “boots on the ground,” while Donald Trump swore he’d “bomb the s— out of” ISIS-controlled oil fields and hand them over to Exx- onMobil. Virtually all GOP contenders, along with a gaggle of Republi- can governors, agreed that they’d close the door to Syrian refugees, too — as though they can evade the consequences of war by mak- ing life more miserable for the in- nocent people fleeing it. None of this bravado makes me feel safer here in Wash- ington, where ISIS threatened more Paris-style bloodshed in a recent video. When I imagine those cold-blooded killers run- ning roughshod through the bars, restaurants, and concert halls my neighbors and I frequent, my stomach drops. But that’s the lesson, isn’t it: When your government answers every problem in the world with military force, war begets war. And eventually there’s nowhere left to hide from it. Peter Certo is the editor of Foreign Policy In Focus and the deputy editor of OtherWords, a non-profit editorial service run by the Institute for Policy Studies.