In Eastern Kentucky, high school football matters, and so do elections

There has been a football boomlet in my little corner of Kentucky. Within a 25 mile radius, 2019 has produced three state championship teams and one runner up. Some say that is a good thing.

One of the other delights of the mountains is Sunday afternoon radio preachers. Those of us who home-church do sometimes love a sermon and we prefer the Sunday afternoon, untamed and raw versions, to the Sunday morning radio church, which features the big town churches where they have elevated screens and sing songs written minutes earlier which are as forgettable as the Books of Haggai or Nahum.

Well, anyway, last Sunday, during the football craze, I was listening to a Johnson County preacher, who no doubt was proud of his county’s football teams, who announced that it is a good thing to make it to Heaven, even if you only get in by one point. A win is a win, I suppose.

A one vote win in the recent election would have been enough for a few hundred thousand poor people to keep their meager subsistence checks and food stamps. Elections do matter. There are those who want to stop helping poor children get food because some of their parents won’t work, or simply because they think the poor are unworthy of food. A Christ-like view, they would say.

The people who were about to get cut off (taken to the Matt) by last Monday’s governor do not vote, and if they did would probably have been Foxed into voting for Bevin. These folks got saved by 800 more people than the other side had who did vote. Oddly enough, the folks about to lose their safety net were helped by Donald J. Trump. His last minute trip to Kentucky fired up political workers across the state — the ones he came to denounce.

Deposed Gov. Bevin either wins by a few votes or loses by a few, and when he loses it is because of what he calls “vote harvesting” in certain areas of big cities where racists will believe that people will sell their vote. Now he knows that if he had restored voting rights to a couple hundred thousand former felons before this last election, he could have harvested a lot of those votes legally and would now be governor again and would not have to return to his old life of walking his pet rat.

He might have picked up 800 more votes in those areas of town if he had not dumped Ms. Hampton, a woman of color he plucked from obscurity and then restored to it.

Elections do matter. Perhaps now Workers’ Compensation judges in Kentucky will not be graded by how many claims they deny. Perhaps now public education dollars will not be offloaded to charter schools for the rich. Perhaps now we can generate a post-coal economy which takes the place of lying to coal miners and pretending that coal will be king and clean both.

And, perhaps those of us who like to see how much food we can eat and how much food we can waste will be able to sit down during the holidays, commit gluttony, a former sin, and not feel so guilty. Let them eat cake.

Reach Larry Webster, a Pikeville attorney at websterlawrence@bellsouth.net.