My Turn: Fight for freedom continues – Concord Monitor

I love the Fourth of July. I love the flags and fireworks, burgers and baseball, parades and pancake breakfasts.

But Independence Day means more than just the things we eat and see. It also means pausing from the daily grind to come together with family and friends and give thanks for the freedoms we enjoy. The right to vote and speak and petition the government for change are a few of my favorite freedoms.

How much freedom do you enjoy?

For Vinny, a computer programmer turned homeless person, the answer is not so much. When I sat down with Vinny in Concord a few years ago, he was preparing for a court date to challenge a peculiar fine concerning the right to lay down his head on public land.

As he relayed to me over lunch at the Friendly Kitchen, he and more than a hundred of his fellow homeless people had been given a days notice to leave their encampment on an overlooked stretch of land they had occupied without incident for years. When they refused, having nowhere else to go, they had their belongings confiscated and were handed fines.

The bureaucrats, politicians say its your choice to be homeless but you dont get to choose where you live, Vinny said, adding that he would never choose this life.

It was not the only fundamental freedom Vinny wished he had. When our conversation turned to politics, the fifty-something independent with close-cropped hair and a sturdy build relayed to me that he had lost the right to vote. I was taken aback.

In my months spent traveling through 30 states by Greyhound bus on a poverty research tour, I had met countless low-income people in homeless camps and shelters who had lost the right to vote but none in the first-in-the-nation primary state I called home.

Vinny explained that he had recently been released from state prison for possession of prescription opioids (illegally obtained by his girlfriend to feed her addiction) and was subject to voting and employment discrimination now that felon followed his name.

By our system of so-called democracy, if I want to go and vote for somebody I cant, Vinny said. Im an ex-felon. I have no voice whatsoever. So how can you bring change by the way the system is right now?

In point of fact, people in New Hampshire who finished serving time behind bars regain the right to vote. Not so in Florida, where Vinny used to live, and 33 other states, where people with felony convictions are disenfranchised long after they have completed their prison sentence. More than 6 million American citizens, most of them impoverished, are currently disenfranchised because of a conviction.

But that does not mean that New Hampshire makes it easy for people like Vinny to vote. In fact, if the recently approved Senate Bill 3 is signed by Gov. Chris Sununu, low-income people who lack a stable address, as well as New Hampshire students living in college dorms, will find it significantly more difficult to vote and will be subject to de facto literacy tests when registering at the polls.

If they are unable to prove their New Hampshire domicile with official documentation, they may even be visited by government agents following Election Day and subject to fines up to $5,000 on the presumption of voter fraud.

It is the first such law in the country to be adopted following President Donald Trumps unproven claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2016 elections claims made all the more outlandish by the mounting evidence that Russian hackers went to great lengths to intervene in our election on Trumps behalf.

Voting rights or no, Vinny did not lack for political opinions. He fervently believed that politics comes down to money and people like him lose out time and again. Like anything else, its big business, he said, adding I think the money thats in it is all big businesses (that) control the vote (and) get their bills passed.

To prove his point, he mentioned drug companies that spend millions in campaign donations and lobbying to grease the wheels and get powerful painkillers approved by the FDA, resulting in people like his girlfriend addicted and people like him behind bars.

His words are a sobering reminder that even in the Live free or die state of New Hampshire, freedom is not enjoyed equally by all. Our system of so-called democracy is falling short.

As lawmakers in Concord conclude this legislative session with a state budget that spends more on business tax cuts for the top 3 percent than homelessness or opioid addiction not to mention rolling back voting rights and rejecting campaign finance reform we would do well to consider that definition of American freedom put forward by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on the eve of World War II: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear.

How free can a person be when voting laws or spending by special interests suppress his right to speak at the polls, when punitive drug policies exacerbate his want and fear?

This July 4th, lets celebrate the freedoms we enjoy and fight like Americans for those freedoms that have yet to be realized for all. Happy Independence Day!

(Dan Weeks is chairman of Open Democracy and author of Democracy in Poverty: A View From Below (PoorInDemocracy.org) published by the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard.)

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My Turn: Fight for freedom continues - Concord Monitor