Kathleen Parker:
Like most Americans, I've never had to be brave to vote. I just show up at the polls, negotiate the ballot, grab an "I voted" sticker and drive home satisfied that the world will continue to turn on its axis in the usual way.
Piece of cake, democracy.
Then again, not really. As I was pondering the Jan. 30 elections in Iraq - and wondering whether I'd have the courage to vote under such circumstances - I was reminded that not so long ago one group of Americans had to be that brave.
It was just 40 years ago in the United States that many African-Americans were prevented from voting and some killed for trying, as were whites who tried to help them. It was only after numerous acts of violence and, yes, terrorism against blacks that the 1965 Voting Rights Act passed.
Imagine that.
In Iraq, terrorists and insurgents loyal to the former Baathist regime try to terrorize men and women who wish only to exercise their right to control their own destiny. In the South of the 1960s, terrorists loyal to segregation and Jim Crow hid behind white sheets while they burned crosses and terrorized blacks who wanted only to control their own destinies. They behead; we lynched.
Imagine that.
...
I imagine that Iraqis walking to the polls Sunday - anticipating the possibility of violence, a car bomb or a stray bullet - must feel what American marchers, black and white, felt on March 7, 1965, as they started across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., toward the state capitol in Montgomery.
Like today's Iraqis, all they wanted was to vote. They, too, must have felt their stomachs knot, knowing that armed state troopers at any moment might rain violence on their unprotected heads. Which, of course, they did. Insurgents in Iraq; state-sanctioned terror in America. We have seen this before.
We've come a long way.
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