COMMENT ON "THE EVIL OF LESSER EVIL VOTING."

THIS IS A COMMENT ON THE GREEN PARTY OF MINNESOTA DISCUSSION LIST ABOUT A PREVIOUS POST ENTITLED "THE EVILS OF lESSER EVIL VOTING," THE PREVIOUS POST HAD DISCUSSED HOW VOTING FOR THE LESSER EVIL MAKES YOU COMPROMIST AND ABANDON YOUR IDEALS.

I have a vivid example of just how lesser evil voting causes
people to compromise and virtually destroy their ideals. But first,
I must
take up some space to convey just how bad the Democrats were in this
instance and how far this person was willing to go in abandoning
his ideals.
I became aware of this situation when a former resident of a
Minneapolis suburb, who was then an inmate at Parchman State Prison
in
Mississippi, wrote to ACT-UP/Minnesota seeking help. Most of the HIV
positive inmates at Parchman were getting virtually no medical care,
only
a few even receiving AZT and none getting the three drug treatment
and regular viral load monitoring that in 1997 was becoming the
standard of care for HIV/AIDS. The temperatures in Parchman would
typically reach 100 degrees Fahrenheit during the summers, which with
the humidity common in the Gulf states, was equivalent to 115 to 120
degrees. And any medical professional will tell you that high
temperatures can be deadly to anyone who is debilitated for any
reason, whether it be cancer, AIDS or any other debilitating
illness.
HIV positive inmates would die periodically because of the heat. The
prison
plumbing was so bad that when the toilet in one cell was flushed, the
toilet in the adjacent cell would overflow and drip down onto the
bedding of the inmate in the cell below. During the summer inmates
would have to constantly bat flies away from their food in the mess
hall and, given the propensity of flies to fly around and alight at
random, it is a statistical certainty that some of these flies had
been crawling around in the toilet waste before they alighted on the
inmates food.
The two prison "doctors" had what one inmate descibed as "criminal
medical backgrounds," which meant that previous criminal convictions
had made it impossible for the two "doctors" to work in medicine
anywhere but in a prison. Not only were the HIV positive inmates
receiving virtually no medical care for HIV/AIDS, the inmates were
receiving little or no medical care for any other medical condition
as well. One inmate broke his hand while playing ball. A prison
nurse kept telling the "doctor" he needed to look at the inmate's
hand but the "doctor" kept saying there was nothing wrong with his
hand. He was in pain and in danger of losing his hand for eleven
days
before he was finally transferred to the University of Mississippi
Medical Center. Another inmate had injured his back in an automobile
accident and needed a special mattress. The "doctor" told him that
he had "injured his back before coming to prison" and that "it was
his
responsibility to fix it."
Needless to say, these conditions were equivalent to the death
camps of Nazi Germany and the former Yugoslavia for inmates with
HIV/AIDS.
Now to the point. I had voted for a third party in 1996 after
Wellstone had stated that "marriage was for a man and a woman" and
announced his intention to vote for the Defense Of Marriage Act. But
with Bush running against Gore, I was weakening and thinking that
maybe I had better vote for Gore in 2000. It was then that I read in
the November, 1998 POZ magazine that the same ACLU attorney who was
working on the Parchman case, Margaret Winter, was looking forward to
appealing a case about inmates with HIV/AIDS in Alabama prisons to
the Supreme Court when the Clinton/Gore Administration had filed a
brief on Alabama's side, arguing that the consequences of prisoners
contracting AIDS were so grave that prisoners with HIV had to be
segregated from the other inmates. This segregation included HIV
positive inmates not even being allowed to attend chapel services
with other prisoners. Although the Clinton/Gore Administration
argued that this segregation was necessary, only South Carolina,
Alabama and Mississippi segregated HIV positive prisoners. But
Clinton/Gore took the position of the most backward, AIDSphobic,
bigoted parts of the country. POZ
described Alabama prisons as the WORST for HIV positive inmates which
meant, if that is accurate, that the Alabama system that
Clinton/Gore had intervened on the side of, was even WORSE than
Mississippi's.
All this, of course, put a stop to any thoughts on my part of
voting for the Democratic Party and, with an Al Gore rally coming up
in downtown Minneapolis on October 28, 2000, I began preparing a
leaflet to distribute at the the rally. I called up a person who had
been very active in ACT-UP/Minnesota, who had in fact been described
by one AIDS activist as having been "known as Mr. ACT-UP," to ask for
help in financing the leaflet and confronting Al Gore. He replied
that "I don't think Gore needs to be confronted right now" with the
tight race he was in with Bush. In the course of the conversation, I
finally said, "SO YOU THINK THE PARCHMENT INMATES WILL JUST HAVE TO
SUFFER FROM THOSE CONDITIONS UNTIL GORE GETS ELECTED?" He
replied, "YES."
I did distribute the leaflet at the Gore rally which
concluded, "Regardless of which party you support, surely common
decency should compel everyone to hold the Clinton Administration
accountable." At that time, I had already decided to vote for Ralph
Nader but I concluded without an explicit Nader endorsement to make
the message easier for the Democrats to accept.
But as I said in a later version of the leaflet after someone
helped me print more copies, "The most charitable interpretation
possible of their (the DFL'ers) behavior (at the Gore rally) is that
they were too blinded by their partisan desperation to show any of
the common decency this leaflet called for. The Democratic officials
nationally and in Mississippi who allow the conditions at Parchman
State Prison to continue to exist clearly do not have any decency,
common or otherwise."
I concluded with a paragraph about the futility of voting for the
lesser evil. "The Democrats deserve their present desperation
because they have been pulling this lesser evil scam on us at least
since the Roosevelt Administration of 1932. (Added comment by R.H. --
Actually much longer. Green historian Mark Lause has documented how
supporting the Democrats as the lesser evil has been a death trap for
third parties since 1867.) When you vote for the lesser evil, the
greater evil can become even more evil and the lesser evil has room
to become even more evil also. The trend is steadily to the right
and more evil. It is time to end this disfunctional relationship and
stand up to the Democrats greater evil threat. Vote for something
good instead! VOTE FOR RALPH NADER FOR PRESIDENT!"
Robert Halfhill rhalfhill@juno.com


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