Kamisaka Sekka
Cranes
(Late 19th, Early 20th Century)

“Autocracy only ever works after The People have convinced themselves they’re beggars rather than Choosers.”

Beggars can’t be Choosers, or so my mother insisted. She implied that if you’re not Prosperous, you’re relegated to having to take whatever’s left over after the Choosers have satisfied themselves. This notion seems the opposite of self-determination, that bedrock principle this Democracy was founded upon. This seems the belief of the dedicated second-class citizen, who, all E Pluribus Unum aside, understands the position they inhabit in polite society and won’t raise a fuss at a little inequity between friends or fellow citizens. It defines complacency to know the rules were set up against your own best interests and to support them anyway as a self-sacrificial civic responsibility. Beggars can’t be choosers. That’s just the way life is.

The Prosperous, though, do get to choose. They cruise through the buffet line first, confident that they won’t experience shortages, and that they will encounter genuine choices and be capable of actually making them for themselves. Those of us raised to expect dregs were never jealous of their choices, for it seemed to us that they were largely wasted on those so accustomed to having and making choices that choices had lost their impact. Once choice has been reduced to a birthright, it has lost its intended significance. I surprise myself when I hear myself insist that those who never had a chance to choose might have had the superior experience, for we learned to make purses out of sow’s ears and to thrive on whatever arrived. This ability to craft whatever into anything desired, or to genuinely desire whatever happened, seems the superior superpower, anyhow, one that not even choosing could render inferior.

With Prosperity and age comes a begrudging wisdom, or it comes for some. Those raised unable to make choices, as virtual if not necessarily actual beggars, almost begrudgingly learn to choose. We’d really rather just take whatever’s left and magically find genuine satisfaction there in acts of supreme self-reliance, but choices come whether wished for or not. Those of us who still possess the right to vote, for instance, are faced with choices. Repuglican? Democrat? Independent? Undeclared? What about their track record? Who might I choose to represent me, to make choices in my stead, even when I might feel like a beggar in company with the dominant party? I feel pressure to make forced choices, to not submit an “incomplete” ballot, or I had always felt that pressure before. I earlier swore that I would never again vote for any Repuglican candidate, period, and I meant that oath. I would choose not to choose between two repugnant choices as if Democracy insists that beggars can’t be actual choosers. I chose to make good on my oath, so I submitted an incomplete ballot. If Repugs were listed as the only choices for a particular position, I left every choice blank on my ballot. If a candidate of whatever party didn’t pass muster for me, I left them unchosen on my ballot, too. In almost half the local races listed, I chose “none of the above.”

Choice serves as a curious adjunct to freedom, for it seems to require freedom to exercise and to exercise it confirms a freedom possessed, that sense of Prosperity that insists that I already have a choice to exercise. I was not strictly free to choose anyone listed on my ballot this time. I reflected on what it means to still be a member of the Repuglican Party in July of 2026. It means that one has not yet abandoned the party that has already abandoned Democracy and seems to be working hard to ensure it will not survive. Even if you’re not mounting a barricade defending cruelty against legal immigrants and corruption the likes of which nobody has ever witnessed before, your presence on that party’s roster reports that you’ve chosen to stand on the side of evil, and I will never choose to vote for evil. I still feel prosperous enough to decide for myself. Associating with the Repuglican Party beggars choosing, for when they win, everyone else loses, Big Time.

Prosperity comes in many guises. The now age-old question, What’s The Matter With Kansas?, echoes anew whenever election season comes around. Citizens United, by which I mean “citizens dissembled”, spends billions to convince people to choose against their own self-interest. The airwaves and streaming services bluster with carefully crafted messages especially designed to convince me to vote against myself, to become a beggar when I could have stood on my God-given hind legs and chosen to vote them sons-a-bitches out of office. They employ scare tactics which shouldn’t work when pitted against any individual’s Prosperity. I refuse to be a beggar, even when I can’t quite afford to appear prosperous. Prosperity accompanies choices, and under some strange yet effective commutative law, choosing produces a Prosperity all its own. Following slavishly was never even distantly related to choosing. A functioning Big D Democracy insists upon the beggars making choices, regardless of what their well-intended mothers might have tried to teach them. Those who refuse to choose for themself, render themselves beggars, which is what the bastard Repuglicans want. Autocracy only ever works after The People have convinced themselves they’re beggars rather than Choosers.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Prosperity, #PureSchmaltz