Sometimes I feel like I am listening to a stuck record playing the same thing over and over again. I am almost 70 years old and I am still seeing many of the issues that we had back in the 50s and 60s. Voter suppression and the communist scare. Big government verse little government. Even government sticking it’s nose in our healthcare happened back then. Why have we not moved on from all these issues?

I was born during the polio epidemic. In fact I was hospitalized when I was two because they thought that I had Polio. I was walking, then I wasn’t. It was thought that I had a mild case of polio which over 70 percent of the cases were, though many have  felt the effects of Polio later in life with symptoms like weakening mussels. People were dying back then. The problem was serious enough for the world to search for a vaccine. I remember standing in line at the gymnasium at Lincoln Junior High so I could get the vaccine that was given to us in the form of a sugar cube. Pretty much the whole country got vaccinated and today Polio is pretty much a thing of the past. Let’s fast forward over 60 years. The world has experience a Worldwide Pandemic which was commonly called Covid 19.  It started in China but for this article where is started wasn’t as important as the fact that it spread all over the world and it spread fast. Why? Because of today’s mode of travel the world, as some would say, is much smaller. It is actually the same size but it is much easier to travel today than at any time in our history. Like Polio, Covid 19 was killing a lot of people. Also, like Polio the majority of people that got Covid 19 had mild cases but it has killed many. The real thing that is different is the political attitude of the country. In the 1950s I don’t remember people running around demonizing the Government or the World Health Organizations that existed at the time because they wanted to rid the world of polio. I remember people wanting to rid this disease that was killing their neighbors.  Not today. Let them die. They call this Freedom?

I remember the Communist scare. It may have started with Joe McCarthy  but it spread throughout the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties.  The Communist scare was what caused the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam War. It was the main reason for the Space Race and the race to the moon.  I remember when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik  in 1957. I remember people worried that the Communists were going to be able to launch missiles from space. I remember when the  Soviet Union sent the first man into space. That was when John F Kennedy set the goal to be the first nation to put a man on the moon. A goal which we accomplished but he did not live to see. The funny thing about Communism is that it was not illegal according to our Constitution. Freedom means freedom to be a communist. Another thing that is funny about Communism was that it is a one party system. A country without choices. We have always had a choice so in reality we have never had a real Communist problem in our Government. We may have had Socialists that we called Communist but as long as we had a choice we didn’t have Communism. Today we have a political group that wants a one party system. That party is the Republican Party. In Florida State Senator Ingoglia is trying to cancel the entire Democratic Party. That is the closest thing to Communism or Fascism that I have ever seen in this country.  Both systems are a one party system that have left many dead.  We all know what Hitler and Fascism did but do you know that Communism under Stalin was worse. It has been estimated that 20 million people were killed under Stalin and that is not counting the people that died during the war. People can say that is a high number but everyone is pretty much in agreement that it was a very violent time in World History. The Republicans would have a one party system here. Many like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Donald Trump have call the Democrats the enemies of the people. Are there death camps in our future?

Also growing up I witnessed the struggle for Civil Rights. I was a young man of 12 when King marched in Selma. I remember seeing pictures of the bloody bridge. I remember how many Entertainers and Religious Leaders joined in that struggle after that. I remember all those  Southern Democrats leaving the Democratic Party because they felt betrayed by President Johnson by  signing of the Civil Rights Bill. I remember how it destroyed him politically. Funny thing is we have never solved the issue of Civil Rights in this country to this day. All my life I have seen racism and the violence that it creates. All my life I have seen the abuses that have led to the riots. Some will say that those abuses should not have ever led to those riots. I don’t know about that but maybe we should never had those abuses in the first place. I have witnessed all my life people saying if they had only submitted to authorities? History shows that when they have submitted to the authorities many times bad things still have happened. Some will say that the Watts Riots of 1965 were due to police brutality. The 1970 Jackson State riot was when a group of Police opened fire killing two and wounding many more. The police stated that they saw a sniper and that they returned fire. The FBI never found any evidence of a sniper. We had the Escambia High School’s riots that was caused because Black Students thought that the name Rebels and the School mascot of a confederate General were insensitive and that they were offended. That riot was mostly led by the white students in retaliation. Four students were shot in the riot and twenty six were injured by people throwing rocks. A Black Schools Board member had his house shot at and a Black Representative had a cross burned on his front lawn. Police violence has also been an ongoing issue whether it is the Black motorist in Tampa beaten to death in 1979, the beating of Rodney King or the execution of George Floyd by the police. There have been hundreds of these incidents in our history and to many in my lifetime.

Voter suppression is also something that should have been taken care of generations ago. They marched for voter rights in the 60s and it look like they had won. Looks can be very deceiving. New ways have been thought up to still suppress the vote. We have a shortage of polling places in the inner city making people to stand in line for hours to cast their vote. We have gerrymandering to make it when you vote it is irrelevant. You have voter ID laws that they say are necessary because of their imaginary voter fraud. In Florida they have a goon squad that is supposed to stop imaginary voter fraud but what they really do is intimidate. Every person they arrested had the charges dropped. In Florida we have had voter fraud but it has been White Republicans that have been voting twice, once in their home state and once in Florida. They were caught by a reciprocal  data base that shared by a number of states. Well Florida has just dropped out of that program. I guess voter fraud is ok in Florida as long as it is White Republican’s  voter fraud. We are almost a quarter of the way through the 21^st Century. We have technology that our forefathers couldn’t have even imagined. Why don’t we use it when it comes to voting? Because it would just make voting suppression harder which would not suit the Republicans.

In my lifetime we have made very little progress when it comes to the real problems that plague this country. I will probably die before they are.