We are a nation of multiple minds, attempting a meeting of minds under agreed rules. But we were flawed at our beginning by the then-common practice of selling and buying fellow humans into slavery. The magnificent promises of our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution, surely well-meant at their writing, along with Abraham Lincoln’s heartfelt prayer at Gettysburg, are not yet reality.

The ballot box is reality — and painfully close to shipwreck with the advent of the Supreme Court decision now universally called Citizens United. I don’t think I’m alone in my failure to read the entire decision, but what I see on TV, in news media generally, and in (sometimes heated) conversation is this: A corporation is now a lawful person, and so can spend its treasury with the same ease as a private individual in promoting its corporate political views.

My email inbox is daily stuffed with urgent pleas that I write or call this or that person (or representative or senator) who needs my help (i.e., cash) to promote their current pressing need, even in a distant district or state.

The single place I can legally cast my vote in person is a ballot box in Waterville’s Junior High School. My money, however, well-mixed with other offerings, can travel anywhere, anonymous, and so promote voting far from home.

I seriously doubt that Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Hamilton or any of our Founding Fathers had a mental picture of today’s paper-and-pixel blizzard, nationwide, urging you and I in Maine to cover the cost of promoting an idea or person in nether Montana or uttermost Idaho. Most political advertising, especially online, is begging us to do just that.

My most political wish, since the advent of Citizens United, is that my fellow citizens remember a corporation is not a thinking person: it is a device intended chiefly to lawfully increase the wealth of its owners, few of whom are present when its decisions are made.

 

John Holt Willey

Waterville

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