Women, Use the Hard-Earned Right to Vote, Wisely

The Night of Terror took place on November 15, 1917 in a prison called the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia. Thirty-three defenseless women dared to picket Woodrow Wilson’s White House asking for their right to vote. The warden ordered his forty prison guards armed with clubs to teach the suffragists a lesson they would never forget.

According to the press of that era, Lucy Burns was chained to the cell bars with her hands above her head all night, bleeding. Dora Lewis was shoved so hard into her cell that she hit her head on the iron bed rails and passed out cold. Her cellmate, Alice Cosu, suffered a heart attack because she thought Dora was dead.

The 33 innocent women were convicted of “obstructing sidewalk” traffic. For weeks, they were subjected to the cruelty of their guards, bent on teaching them the harsh lesson ordered by the President – chocking, beating, grabbing, slamming, and kicking them into submission. Their food was infested with worms. Alice Paul refused to eat and, after being tied to a chair, liquid was poured down her throat through a tube until she vomited. Pauline Adams served a 60 day sentence.

President Woodrow Wilson, a progressive Democrat, attempted to persuade a psychiatrist to declare Alice Paul, one of the leaders, insane. She would then be sent to a state institution for life. The psychiatrist refused by saying, “Courage in women is often mistaken for insanity.”

Women finally got the right to vote on August 18, 1920 when the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified. Amendment XIX prohibits any United States citizen to be denied the right to vote based on sex. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton drafted the amendment that was first introduced in 1878. Tennessee’s ratification was the final vote needed to add the amendment to the Constitution. Challenged in 1922 in Leser v. Garnett, the Supreme Court rejected the claim that the amendment was unconstitutionally adopted.

Young women voting in the 21^st century helped put an unknown charismatic man in the White House in 2008, our first black President, with the platform of “hope and change” and a handy teleprompter, Greek columns, women fainting, and special God-like voice sound effects.

Nobody bothered to challenge or ask what kind of hope and what kind of change our country was going to be subjected to, who asked for this change, and who gave him the mandate to systematically destroy our economy: oil industry, coal industry, energy, health industry, automobile, banking, school loans, education, and NASA.

Once in office, President Obama began a constant barrage of attacks on our Constitution, passing executive order after executive order, the largest number in modern time, making Congress irrelevant, and disregarding the law.

Four years later unemployment is 14.6 percent, not the falsely reported 7.9 percent, everybody lost 40 percent of their wealth and their pension funds, housing is in shambles, business confidence is so low, it is negligible, 47 million Americans are on food stamps, the highest ever in the history of the United States, and the national debt, the biggest threat to our national security, grew in four years from $10 trillion to over $16 trillion and climbing, not counting Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security who are supposedly secure in a non-existent lockbox that Congress has raided long time ago to pay Peter with Paul’s funds.

In two days, young and old women alike will have the chance to vote again for Obama’s non-existent economic platform with the motto “Forward.” You must elect him first before he is actually going to tell you what he is going to do to our country. I am not sure what “Forward” means to the Democrats, I only hope it does not mean going over the cliff like a herd of sheep following the leader on the same disastrous path the U.S. has pursued since 2008. We certainly are not better off than we were $6 trillion ago.

For those who need a refresher in history, “Forward” was the Marxist-Leninist motto in communist Russia and all the other assorted communist Soviet satellite countries. “Vorwärts” ("Forward") was also the central mouthpiece of the Social Democratic Party of Germany published daily in Berlin from 1891 to 1933 and 1948 to present time.

I only hope that women will not take lightly the responsibility to vote in an informed manner. We must remember that women have gained the right to cast a ballot equal with men only 92 years ago. In many third world countries that liberals adore and admire as superior to our own, women are still not allowed to vote or their testimony in court is worth half the testimony of a man.

When you are unemployed with a worthless college degree in your pocket, have no health insurance, are angry that the government is taxing you too much to pay for 47 percent of the population who pays no taxes but receive welfare, the border is not being watched, the government is out of control with its spending, the military is cut down to size and you are afraid for our future as a nation, the quality of education is going down while the cost is escalating, remember how you voted or what you did when you chose to stay home on election day.

November 6, 2012 is perhaps the most important vote of your lifetime – the choice is yours and it is quite simple – do you want to salvage what is left of our Constitutional Republic and free market capitalism, or do you want to live as a serf indebted to an omnipotent government who will tell you what to do from cradle to grave?