Karen Telleen-Lawton: Prop 50 and the Moriori

 | Houses & Way of life

It is a cavernous understatement to say politics as we speak is irritating. I don’t like the concept it’s a recreation with winner-take-all. Or the oft-ludicrous causes individuals find yourself in a single camp or the opposite.

I would favor politicians take heed to all sides’ considerations and attain an affordable, shared consensus quite than a “compromise” that comes with horse-trading unrelated points.

I would like kindness and justice to win out in the long run. Historically, although, that’s not how the world works. I used to be reminded of this when just lately rereading “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1997 ebook by Jared Diamond.

Early in his ebook, Diamond recounts a battle between the Mauri and the Moriori. Both teams descended from early Polynesians who settled New Zealand within the late thirteenth century.

The Mauri remained in New Zealand, turning into fierce warriors, each amongst themselves and later in opposition to European invaders.

The Moriori had been Mauri who left New Zealand round 1500, migrating some 400 miles east to the a lot smaller and colder Chatham Islands (Rekohu). According to Diamond, their remoted, resource-limited atmosphere led them to embrace a hunter-gatherer life-style and a pacifist tradition generally known as the “Law of Nunuku.”

Centuries later, a subsequent encounter between the 2 teams proved a disaster for the Moriori. Some 900 Mauri, displaced by battle, sailed in two giant ships to Rekohu, mounting a raid.

After the primary ship attacked, Moriori elders held a tribal council to debate whether or not to combat again. Ultimately, they selected to uphold their custom of peace.

Consequently, the Mauri started a genocidal marketing campaign, practically exterminating the Moriori and enslaving the survivors.

A Mauri warrior defined that it was carried out, “in accordance with our custom.”

This episode jumped out to me as I used to be pondering Proposition 50, the California proposal to combat gerrymandering with gerrymandering.

I’m not frightened about bloodbath and enslavement (not less than not but), however quite the price of sticking to 1’s ideas versus reacting to the fact that the foundations of the sport have modified.

Gerrymandering is anti-democratic. It promotes unfairness, discourages voter participation, and will increase political polarization. It can too simply result in distorted insurance policies and fewer authorities accountability.

I voted in opposition to gerrymandering in California in 2008 and in 2010, supporting Prop 11 and Prop 20, which established impartial commissions for drawing legislative and congressional districts.

The Princeton Gerrymandering Report Card reveals the diploma to which states have been gerrymandering. California is at the moment labeled a Grade B “better than average with some bias,” regardless of having established impartial commissions.

California’s Prop 50 was created as a response to politicians in Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, and different states redrawing voter district traces out of the conventional decadal redistricting cycle to maximise their occasion’s benefit.

The legislatively drawn congressional district maps drawn by Prop 50 fall beneath the rubric of gerrymandering, however they’re momentary. They would expire on the finish of 2030, after which the redrawing authority returns to the impartial Citizens Redistricting Commission.

Why would anybody who respects democracy assist Prop 50? I suggest that voting in opposition to this measure (or not voting in any respect) could be akin to laying down your weapons when the soldiers are upon you, as a result of the battle itself is distasteful.

As Joyce Vance argues in her new ebook, giving up is unforgivable in our combat to retain democracy. In this mini-election, the selection is to make use of the authorized instruments earlier than us to maintain our eyes on the prize of democracy.

It’s the political legwork Walt Whitman described within the 1800s:

“Did you, oh friend, suppose democracy is only for elections, for politics, and for a party name? I say democracy is of use there, that it may pass on and come to its flower and fruit in manners, in the highest forms of interaction between men, and their beliefs — in religion, literature, colleges, and schools — democracy in all public and private life.”

Let us use our YES vote to assist the flower and fruit of democracy in private and non-private life.