Editorial voices from across the country
Editorial voices from newspapers around the United States:
TV celebrity Mike Rowe – of Ford trucks, dirty jobs and doing it because somebody’s gotta – recently was asked to use his celebrity to encourage people to get out and vote.
He declined. His reasons should give us all pause.
“Regardless of their political agenda, my celebrity pals are fundamentally mistaken about our ‘civic duty’ to vote. There is simply no such thing. Voting is a right, not a duty, and not a moral obligation. Like all rights, the right to vote comes with some responsibilities, but let’s face it – the bar is not set very high,” he said.
Simply said, you shouldn’t encourage someone to vote just to vote. Educating oneself about candidates and issues is a time-consuming task that should not be reduced to a whim inspired by a Hollywood personality’s earnest plea. Our initial reasons for creating a public education system were so that we would produce voters capable of evaluating and understanding the choices they were making at the ballot box.
Thomas Jefferson wrote in support of public education that: “The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents. There is no safe deposit for these but with the people themselves; nor can they be safe with them without information. Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe.”
The Justice Department is moving to fill a giant hole in its accounting of shootings and other violent encounters between police officers and civilians across the country. The complete absence of an official national database has led to lots of speculation and potentially rash assumptions about the rate of police-involved shootings, particularly involving minorities.
FBI Director James Comey said the information void is embarrassing for his agency, acknowledging that sometimes officials must rely on databases compiled by The Washington Post and The Guardian when tracking violent encounters. The Justice Department will now compile its own database.
It’s about time. Ever since the August 2014 death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., police-involved shootings have been the focal point of national debate about perceived police bias against minority members, particularly blacks. The absence of a federal database has contributed to wild speculation and assertions about whether such incidents are on the rise.
Public trust in community police departments depends on accurate data. If, in fact, certain departments have a higher rate of violent encounters with minorities, a statistical database should document it. The database, along with substantiating material from dashboard and body cameras, also is the best way for police departments to defend themselves if the evidence directly refutes the publicly held assumption of bias.
The times, they are surely a-changin’ when the august Nobel Prize committee bestows its annual prize for literature on Bob Dylan. Changing for the better, we’d add. The author of lyrics so poignant that they are seared in the memories of millions richly deserves Nobel recognition as a poet as well as a popular music star.
The Swedish Academy’s choice was unexpected. In recent years, its literature award has tended to go to writers less familiar to popular audiences. Until last week, no American had won the literature prize since Toni Morrison took it in 1993. Seldom, if ever, has a writer known primarily for popular song lyrics been the honoree.
It may be that choosing Dylan was the Swedish Academy’s tacit acknowledgment that popular art and high art are not mutually exclusive and that artists who speak to a mass audience are worthy of encouragement. One might say that the waters around the Nobel Prize have grown. That’s a welcome, democratizing change.