"What We've Got Here Is Failure To Communicate"

One might be excused for thinking that by now, more than 200 years after the first disputed presidential election, our forebears or ourselves would have stepped up to the issue and put in place the mechanics necessary to allow a democratic nation to hold a democratic election. Yet here we are, in one of the worst economic recessions in history and amidst a pandemic that has already cost the country two hundred thousand lives, and we still don't know how to count the votes, who should be "allowed" to vote (as if anyone's permission needs to be granted!), how to set up credible polling places, whether those standing in lines for hours in deliberately scarce polling sites should be allowed to cast ballots, what to do when those in power use the agencies of government to subvert the process, and debating whether a president who loses at the polls can nevertheless hold onto power by threat or by coup. America's election process is subverting America's democracy. The story is occasionally told in bits and pieces, but it receives nowhere near the attention it merits -- indeed, the attention it should command. There are reasons for this shortfall. One of them, and I submit the most important one, is mainstream media's failure to highlight the issue.

We have never, under any administration, had a national mission to get high-speed, affordable broadband deployed and adopted in every household and business across the land. Individual agencies work at it, but no individual agency can get this job done by itself. We have lacked a mission and a plan to connect America for a quarter of a century, while much of the rest of the world moves ahead. The private sector is not going to get this done by itself, nor can government. We need meaningful working partnerships among the private sector, federal, state, and local governments, cooperatives, and regional entities.  What is required is leadership from the top and coordination across the board. It must start with a president who presents the vision and develops the mission. Then it requires funding for this essential infrastructure that, to be effective, must be universal. It also requires realizing that this is how most of the country's earlier vital infrastructures were built -- from the roads, bridges, and canals of early days through the railroads, highways, and electrification projects of more recent years. We are today paying a disastrous and totally unnecessary price for the short-sightedness of recent years. The longer we delay, the more we will hurt.