Voiceless

[published as a letter in Muddy River News, January 27, 2025]  

    I am politically voiceless.

    I am voiceless because I am a Democrat in Illinois’s 15th Congressional District. The State of Illinois, run by Democrats, has gerrymandered me into a district where my representative, Ms. Mary Miller, is not likely to take my views seriously.  She will not do that because if she does, she will be primaried, and there will not be enough Republicans to save her. Democrats who might support her are voiceless in her primary.

    Of course I am not alone. All the Republicans in Illinois’s Democratically  gerrymandered distracts are just as voiceless as I am.

    But us gerrymandered “voicelesses” are not alone either. Anyone under the age of 18 is voiceless too. 

    What got me thinking about this is the plight of so many people around me who are “undocumented.” It has to be terrifying to live in a place where you can leave home to go to the store and never see your family again. ICE (Immigration and Customs) can pick you up and disappear you, possibly without even a phone call home.

    I suspect (without evidence, having not done any scientifically reputable research on the question) that there are a lot of young people who are screaming angry not only because of what will be happening to our undocumented friends and neighbors, but because of what will be happening to our environment when we resume “drill, baby, drill.” Those young people will have to live in the world that drilling will accelerate. But they are even more voiceless than us older gerrymandered “voicelesses.”

    I got to thinking of how we voiceless people could get our voices heard. We could create online communities, including under 18’s, but in the age of AI, we could be cloned by the thousands and buried in our clones. How could we avoid that?

    Well, maybe if we could create a verifiable chain of real people, extending from ourselves to some real person that most people in the neighborhood would recognize as a real person, we might be able to resist cloneness. That would put value on personal contact between actual human beings, and some of us could use more of that kind of contact. Suddenly we would have a voice, somewhere, and someone might listen.

    Gerrymandering is destroying our politics. It is rendering half the country voiceless. Both parties are doing it.

    Not surprising. I am a Christian, and Christians believe that all of us humans are capable of sin, which is behavior that hurts others, not only God. We create our own punishment. We make ourselves voiceless.

 

Brother Joe Zimmerman, O.F.M.