Tuesday is Election Day, and many of us will be going out to the polls to cast our votes for John McCain or Barack Obama or who have you. There will be many, however, who won't go to the polls, who won't cast their votes and who won't exercise their rights.
I have a modest proposal to put before the American people: Why, in the interest of fairness, don't we take away the civil rights of the people who decide not to vote? These people are clearly completely satisfied with having their minds made for them by others. They won't mind if they don't have rights. In fact, many of them don't even know what their rights are. If they don't miss one, will they miss all of them? I think not.
There are some who say that these non-voters are just generally happy with the government. If so, they certainly don't need rights; what are they but guarantees against a government's incursion into their lives? If they're satisfied with the government now, do they need protection from it? Again, I think not.
Many will call this proposition out of line, tyrannical, Stalin-esque. It needn't be; without rights, many people will lead happy and wonderful lives. Consider what they'll be giving up.
Free Speech? Nothing more than a guarantee that the government cannot censor you. Considering the degree of comfort that non-voters feel with the status quo, certainly they won't have anything to say that government would care to censor. I'm sure the loss of that right won't be a problem.
Freedom of Religion says the government can't impose religion on you. Now, I know there has been some buzz surrounding the neoconservative idea of unifying America under Christian values, but values aren't "Christianity" per se. Face it: The government isn't interested in controlling your religion unless its precepts involve killing people or embezzling large sums of money. This particular right seems like a bit of an unnecessary precaution, really.
Freedom of the Press is the same as the top of this list, except in the printed word. Will non-voters care, in their enviably bovine complacence, if those pesky journalists can't openly question the affairs of the higher-ups? Probably not, and neither does the government. Maybe we'll actually get some colonization done without the media making a big stink about it.
Finally, though the list goes on, in the case of habeas corpus and due process, my answer is simple to the detractors: don't do things that get you arrested and you won't have to worry about it. Good people don't jaywalk. And, faced with the knowledge of certain incarceration or death for anything from first-degree murder to double parking, people would be a lot less likely to act out they way they do now.
So, I hope you, the American people, will take my proposition and run with it. Don't bother voting, and cast off a few other cumbersome rights while you're at it. Let others choose how to run the nation for you, and it will be a much simpler, less confusing place.
Aaron Davis is a sophomore English major who's totally on board for eating poor Irish babies.