by Chloe Diaz, Contributing Writer
A little over a week ago, on February 3rd, Iowa was the first state to have their democratic primary votes. We know today that the end poll results have Buttigieg leading, with 26.8% of the vote, Sanders with 25.2%, Warren with 18.4%, Biden trailing with 15.4% and Amy Klobuchar with 12.6%. But what could this possibly mean, considering the difficulties it took to get here?
Another instance of lost trust. Trump’s acquittal came to no one’s surprise, except for perhaps the idea of Hope. It came and it went and honestly, I barely registered it. No one talked about it in their daily lives, and no one was in tears, because the Loyalist senators were never expected to rise to the occasion anyways. He has chipped at the white house to fashion a throne, and this is a loss that will embed itself into the American narrative, American trauma, for decades to come. The Iowa debacle was a minor event in retrospect, yet another jarring reminder that those who have power to decide can always fail. Will, eventually, fail. In the wake of the well know, un-punished Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, why would they make an app for voting? Why would they rush it into creation two months before the primary? There were so many technical issues that caucus workers were flooded with phone-in votes, who in turn struggled to keep up with the pace and tallied votes by hand sent to an unmonitored email. According to the New York Times, the failure ran deep and wide and became “a total system breakdown” that casts “doubt on how a critical contest on the American political calendar has been managed for years”. The app was originally expected to be the system of voting that the majority of people would use, so one can imagine that the lack of planning and staffing when only 25% of the votes came in through it would cause a ripple effect on the entire system.
States function with a system that is similar to the Electoral College, counting the certain number of delegates allocated to Iowa and deciding the victor of the primary according to the most delegates. Not from the individual vote. Both in 2016 and this year, Bernie Sanders won the popular vote yet finished second.
The chaos is a symptom. The country is huge, yet there is a true loss of sense of the People. You can’t help but be dismayed with the results of the impeachment “trial”, with the Loyalist senators, with the long list of apocalyptic headlines, with the first primary reaching the peak of disfunction, and this will haunt us for longer than we will be able to remember. For decades to come.
I, for one, struggle to understand why the values that are truly for the People, for the Self and for the Others, are scorned. What was once a sensibility for rugged individualism and strength has festered into a repulsion for all those who threaten the lone white cowboy in a land that isn’t his. To oppose universal healthcare, is to reject a more empathetic society. It is the only possible solution to the fear we all encounter when encountered with a bodily anomaly. Our bodies are an eternal mystery to us, and yet there are those who refuse our right to health. Our right to survival. To oppose universal healthcare is to oppose a kindness.
As a People, we have the right to have faith in our government. The distrust and the disillusionment that has taken ahold of the country in the past four years is unprecedented, and the chaos rolls on unaccounted for.
