By John S. Sonin
We need the Senate to kill the filibuster.
Voltaire’s absurd tautology in his “Candide” goes, “All is for the best, in this, the best of all possible worlds,” Voltaire fails to consider the maintenance and effort required to counteract the natural, decaying forces of time wherein they are the “best,” right this moment but they were better a moment-ago and they’ll be worse a moment from now. That’s because all things inherently breakdown, naturally decay, unless the energy of effort in maintenance is administered for the “forces of time” are always working toward dissolution, wearing and tearing to disassemble. In physics it’s called the “heat death of the universe,” or entropy. The application of human labor is only way to keep entities organized, keep them optimal or at their “best.”
This same type of energy-input is necessary in the maintenance of our culture, our economy, our democracy. Voters democratically hire representatives to leadership whose primary purpose is to orchestrate both, the ‘best’ economic efficiency and the ‘best’ electoral representation that perpetuate into perpetuity an ever-expanding economy and ever more inclusive voting base — it’s all about our children and their future while we need suffer the “less than best” pretensions of our parents!
My hope/wish for us in the U.S.A. is never to backtrack, never to revert to that “less than best’ condition, never to lose or demean our current quality-of or state-of-conditions — our civilized condition — as we all must hope/wish/pray as stewards of our forefathers gift, their ‘gift’ to our children. The decimating four-years of Trumpism have been a desecrating reversal in “doing our best.” Doing our best in pursuit of that national purpose — our pursuit of a more perfect union — thriving for our best as our children’s constitutional caretakers, and we can do that by killing the confederate filibuster.
S.1, the “For the People Act,” was an opportunity to re-seize that ‘never-ending’ struggle and our elected representatives need reclaim the mantel of our economic and electoral progress at this, the ‘best’ moment, before the social digression to lazy warlord populism dispels Voltaire’s cultural prognoses reversing it to, ‘All is for the worst in this the worst possible world.’
• John S. Sonin resides in Douglas.
