Op-Ed: Here's why we vote

As Election Day 2021 approaches, I exhort every registered citizen to vote in our local elections. The levels of government with the most impact to our daily lives will have their leadership determined on Tuesday, Nov. 2.

Just whose will shall be expressed on Election Day? Normally, local elections are the sleepiest, leaving motivated special alliances of citizens able to work their wills upon a detached electorate.

Will that be the case this year? Will the most politically active among us once again cast their shadows across the rest of us?

I certainly hope not! I earnestly hope that everyone who is legally entitled to vote exercises their franchise. Every citizen has a duty to make the best informed choices they can at the Ballot Box. Corruption and the abuse of power thrive on our neglect.

Each of us has notions of how we might improve our society. If we do nothing on Election Day to further our visions of a better world, we are worse than useless. We betray the sacrifices that our ancestors made in the hope that we would remain free.

Whatever our convictions, America needs our attention to and involvement in the electoral process. Without our personal participation, liberty must devolve into authoritarianism.

Here is how I see matters as a Conservative:

Many among us wish to fundamentally alter our Constitutional Republic.

Progressive domestic and foreign policies have caused the inflationary, labor, and supply-chain pressures that are degrading the living standard of all Americans. When we complain, we are told that we should all just check our privilege and lower our expectations.

California, exemplifying the future that Leftists tout, is now in effect a Third World society where street crime is ignored, looting is a commonplace, and roving vagrants physically pollute all open spaces outside from the elite's gated enclaves. Their answer: “Defund the Police.”

Public health policy has stripped us of control over our own bodies. Our rights to earn a living and exercise free speech are also subject to a tyranny of the majority, where personal conscience is sacrificed to force compliance.

In our K-12 schools, policies of "equity" deny traditional notions of meritocracy and distort what is taught to conform to political correctness. School leaders mischaracterize any criticism directed against this as either malicious misinformation, or as physical threats.

Universities show what they would do to the whole society, if they could, to dismantle traditions they demonize as Patriarchy, white supremacy, non-fluid gender roles, cis-gendered normativeness, structural racism and climate-change denial.

Locally, elected county leadership is under assault. In the name of improving efficiency, political moderates hope to continue dominating this region's Conservative populace. These civic leaders want the unseemly recent popular activism to just go away. They advocate a civility which equates to silent deference.

I am voting for the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee's recommended slate of candidates because my top priority is to resist leftist national trends by making local government more fully reflect our region's principled Conservative majority.

I must comment about KCRCC-endorsed David Reilly, candidate for Post Falls School Board District Seat 5. No amount of context can make certain of his past public comments anything but odious.

I did speak with him, and he seems to repent of these comments. I accept that he does not now maintain an anti-Semitic stance.

Despite this, and despite my own feet of clay, I do not think I would vote for him. I think these past comments would compromise him in office.

Only Post Falls voters can really determine if his current ideals matter more than his fallible past.

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In Maine and then Idaho, Ralph K. Ginorio has taught the history of Western Civilization to high school students for nearly a quarter century. He is an “out-of-the-closet” Conservative educator with experience in special education, public schools and charter schools, grades 6-12. He has lived in Coeur d’Alene since 2014. Email: rginorio@cdapress.com