Want to know the most important thing in politics? It's voting

What's the most basic thing about elections?

Voting.

I live in Sun City Peachtree, an active-adult community just outside the Atlanta metropolitan area. We're in the northern part of Spaulding County, which was a population of about 64,000.

We have a County Commission, and one of the residents from our community ran for one of the five seats.

He campaigned hard within our community and did an extraordinary job of getting out the vote.

In the May primary, he was the leader of the three main candidates but came up short of the 50 percent needed for the Republican nomination. The way things work in Georgia, that put the top two finishers into a runoff in late July.

Our guy won, with roughly two-thirds of the vote. There are no Democrats in the county -- at least not enough to matter -- so he will be unopposed in the

Two weeks or so later, a couple of county residents wrote letters to the local newspaper, the Griffin Daily News, to express their displeasure.

"Looks to me like Sun City rules, no matter what."

It's easy to understand the fear. Spaulding County is economically depressed, and Sun City is a planned community of new houses that will only get larger. As of 2014, there are between 750-800 homes occupied. The plan is that within 12 to 15 years there will be 3,500 homes.

When that time comes, Sun City will be a big dog, and one thing that will bother locals is that many of its residents will be from outside Georgia and even the South. What they don't know is that they will change us as much or more as we will change them.

One immediate difference, though, is that we vote in large numbers. A summer runoff usually draws extremely low numbers, even with a runoff to determine the Republican nominee for a U.S. Senate seat. Countywide, just 5,055 voters went to the polls in the runoff in 21 precincts. But in the Sun City precinct, there were 986 eligible voters and 840 of them cast ballots.

That's an 82 percent turnout.

Woody Allen said it best when he said that 80 percent of life is just showing up.

That's even more true in politics, where folks who show up and get others to do the same have more influence than anyone other than maybe the mega-donors.

Not everyone can donate millions.

But everyone can show up.

There really is a place in this world for people who hate government

People who hate government always seem to come back to two examples -- the DMV and the Postal Service.

These two organizations are made to seem like the closest thing to Hell on Earth, things that would be so much better if we lived in a Libertarian paradise.

In reality, though, other things are far worse. The DMV is crowded because at one time or another, nearly everyone needs their services.

As for the Postal Service, I'm with Jon Stewart on this one. When someone attacked the Postal Service, he asked if they meant those people who would deliver a letter to his sister on the other side of the country within two or three days for less than half a dollar.

Awful, huh?

Anybody who thinks that's awful obviously has never dealt with a cable company. You know, the folks who tell you they'll be there on Thursday sometime between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. to install your cable TV.

Or even worse, how about dealing with an insurance company? My friend Mick is a proud anti-government type, but the worst horror stories I have ever heard from him have nothing to do with the government. Mick can do an extemporaneous hour on the horrors of medical insurance.

Private medical insurance.

At least at the DMV there's no one whose job is to stop people from getting drivers' licenses.

The fact is for the last 35 years, there has been a concerted campaign by folks on the far right to destroy people's faith in government. Whether it has been eliminating programs that benefit the less fortunate, or flattening out the progressive income tax, or worst of all, the estate tax.

I've heard people say that one of the worst things about our country is that we have reached a point where people worry more about their rights than about their responsibilities.

On the most basic level, government exists for one of two reasons -- either to protect the poor from being exploited by the rich or to protect the rich from having their possessions stolen or destroyed by the have-nots. In recent years we have swung from one side of the pendulum to the other.

Seventeenth-century English philosopher John Locke said that the purpose of governments was to protect people's rights to life, liberty and property. Partly traditional, although the idea of liberty wasn't all that widespread in a 17th century in which kings ruled by the divine right of God.

In the final quarter of the 18th century, Thomas Jefferson spoke of the basic rights of man as being "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." It may not have been as big a difference as it seems now; owning property was a big part of happiness in 1776. But I'm not sure Jefferson and the other founders ever envisioned a society in which one family would be worth $140 billion.

After all, as Doctor Evil learned in the "Austin Powers" movies, some sums are too big even to imagine.

And while it may be difficult for today's crop of Libertarians to imagine things worse than the DMV or the postal service, if you want the best present-day example of a Libertarian  paradise, just head northeast along the coast from Mombasa. It's an 18-hour drive from there to Eden.

Mogadishu, Somalia.

No laws, no gun control.

No DMV, no post office.

Just do whatever you want.

It's wrong to attack Williams for wanting to escape his pain

If there is one thing that truly has stunned me about the death of Robin Williams, it's the outpouring of venom from people who call themselves conservatives.

What Dreams May Come

Whether it's Rush Limbaugh using Williams' suicide as an example of how unhappy liberals are or some of my co-religionists saying suicide is the only unforgivable sin, it's like Stupid just went on sale at the Walmart.

Limbaugh is one thing. He jumped the shark years ago and hasn't said anything sensible or perceptive since Bush was president. The first Bush.

As for my fellow Catholics, I know the doctrine, but I refuse to believe that a Ted Bundy or an Adolf Hitler or even a Dick Cheney could repent at the last moment and scoot off to paradise, yet a depressed, troubled person could take his own life and never find his way out of Purgatory.

Ironically, one of Williams' more underrated movies dealt with exactly this subject. He plays a man who dies in an accident and goes to heaven. His wife can't cope with missing him. She kills herself and winds up in hell. He is told that she cannot be saved, that people who kill themselves are damned by the fact that they don't even know they're dead.

That's not the God I worship. In one of Stephen King's lesser books, "Desperation," much of the story is given up to thoughts of how tough God is and what sacrifices he demands of us. But the character who makes the ultimate sacrifice leaves a message behind that sums everything up in just three words.

"God is love."

I refuse to believe that the God in which I believe would punish someone who was in such terrible pain for no longer being able to cope with it.

Generally, it isn't bad people who take their own lives. The chance of someone like Dick Cheney killing himself is only slightly greater than the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series three years in a row.

Most of the people we lose are people who will be missed, people who really made a difference in other people's lives.

And the ones who live forever are the Rush Limbaughs and the Dick Cheneys.

It's a messed-up world.

One thing was true: Williams wasn't like anyone else at all

"Shazbot!"

Explaining exactly how and why Robin Williams made such a major splash in the fall of 1978 as the main character in "Mork and Mindy" is almost impossible now.

For one thing, it was nearly 36 years ago, the age of Jimmy Carter, disco music and Reggie Jackson. A very different time.

Mork from Ork

For another, seeing the comedy explosions Williams did as Mork from Ork is no surprise to people who experienced the next four decades of his comedy, from wonderful to excruciatingly awful. And with Williams' death at the age of 63 this morning, there won't be any more Adrian Cronauers or Mrs. Doubtfires, but there won't be any more Patch Adamses either.

But in 1978, none of us had ever seen anything like him.

It wasn't just that he was funny. There were lots of funny people on television and plenty of funny shows.

My friend Bill Madden summed it up very well at the time.

"We don't watch the show because it's a great show," he said. "It isn't. We watch it for that minute or so in every episode when he just does off and starts free associating."

When Williams moved on to films, his first two roles showed the dichotomy his career would take. He had the title role in "Popeye," one of the worst movies legendary director Robert Altman would ever make, but he showed his acting skills to best advantage in George Roy Hill's "The World According to Garp."

In the end, if the good movies he made outweighed the bad ones, it wasn't by much. He did have three Oscar nominations for leading roles, and he won a best supporting actor Oscar in 1997 for "Good Will Hunting."

Matt Damon and Robin Williams

In that movie, he played a psychiatrist working with Matt Damon's mathematical prodigy, and what he did better than anything else was tone himself down.

He battled addiction issues all his life, and for the last year or so he dealt with serious depression. I don't know why, but if there's one thing I know from studying comedians, many of the funniest people out there are either very angry or very sad.

If it is true that Williams took his own life, I can't help but wonder if at 63 he felt that his best years were behind him and he didn't look forward to a world in which people talked about how great he used to be.

"Good Morning, Vietnam"

I'll always remember the fall of 1978, though. That minute or two each week on "Mork and Mindy" every week was usually the biggest laugh for me, but I can't help but remember when my first wife and I got together with friends of ours who had a two-year-old daughter.

The big joke was that they had taught her to say Mork's most famous catch word from the show.

"Shazbot!"

It was an expression of surprise, or sometimes annoyance or even chagrin. But it was hilarious to hear this little girl saying it and she loved the laughs she got.

Funny that I find myself thinking of her. I haven't seen her or her parents since 1979, and the last time I saw my first wife was 1982.

It seems so very long ago.

A lifetime, in fact.

When the center fails to hold, we won't like what comes next

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre, The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."

-- W.B. YEATS, "The Second Coming"

Can the centre hold?

Yeats had it right, and it's beginning to look as if Mencken did too.

As far back as there has been a country, Americans have understood that in a republic, what is good for the most people is generally what works best for the nation as a whole. It didn't always work that way. Until the 20th century, Americans lived under a fairly rigid if unofficial class system.

Unless someone was fortunate enough to invent something or lucky enough to find precious minerals, the chance of a working-class person to become rich was about as likely as the Horatio Alger stories being true.

Two things happened that changed our society, both of them during World War I. One was the income tax and the other was the estate tax, both of them worked to reduce the strength of what was essentially an American aristocracy.

From then up until about 1980, we built one of the most egalitarian societies the world has ever known, and at a fairly high level. Through the 50s and most of the 60s as well, it was possible for a man without much of an education to get a good enough job to own a home, raise a family and live a reasonably middle-class lifestyle.

But just as Ronald Reagan once said that freedom is never more than one generation away from being threatened, the same is true of an egalitarian society. The mega-wealthy, America's "aristocrats," never stop battling for ways to reduce the amount of their money that goes to the government.

Less than 35 years later, our country has changed fundamentally. Mencken said that ignorance and greed would ultimately bring our republic down, and even if it isn't the same people who are ignorant and greedy, they're all over the place these days.

Maybe the best way to look at it is that the ignorant are allowing the greedy to steal from the rest of us.

We allow a family with $140 billion net wealth to continue growing their fortune by keeping their workers in poverty.

We allow two brothers with more than $80 billion between them essentially to buy entire state governments to further their own interests.

The center won't hold much longer.

And when it finally does not hold, when everything put together falls apart, we may have the answer to Yeats' question in "The Second Coming."

"What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

Academic excellence comes in strange ways and then vanishes quickly

In the course of nearly 25 years of school, I managed to come across some teachers with some odd gimmicks.

In the mid '70s, when I was trying to get my mojo back taking some junior college courses, I signed up for Sociology 101 and met a teacher who gave the final exam on the first day of class.

The deal was to give his students some idea of what the class would cover. He offered one incentive. Anyone who earned a passing grade on the final could leave, never show up again and he would give them a B with no work at all.

On a 90-80-70-60 grading scale, 60 percent or better would win the Kewpie doll. He said he had been doing it for three years and no one had ever passed the final on the first day.

So we took the test. I think he had four classes with about 150 students, and he came in a few days later to tell us that one of his 150 students had earned a 62 on the test. A pretty bad grade at the end of the quarter, a pretty good one at the beginning.

I think I was 23, and when it came to school, I was totally f**ked up. I had flunked out of college three times between 1969 and 1971, and I had no clue at all what I was doing with my life.

One might think displaying enough knowledge to pass the final would have made it easy for me to earn an A in the class, but that wasn't the way I rolled then. I took the B and never showed up again.

After a few years working for the government and then living overseas with my first wife, I went back to school five years later with a plan in mind and the goal of being a journalist. I went back to the junior college to clean up some credits and I signed up for the second part of the Sociology class.

Same teacher.

Same gimmick.

He apparently didn't remember me, which was no shock. I had been in his class for two days five years ago.

He told the class his gimmick, and he said that in the eight years he had been teaching, only one student had ever succeeded on the first day.

A few days later he came in to tell us that number now was two. Actually one. But twice.

He asked me what I wanted to do this time.

I was 28, and the last time I had done really well in school was sixth grade. I got straight A's all through elementary school and then went into the tank. Once I made it to college, I started cutting classes and eventually even cutting final exams.

The word is "self-destructive."

But in the spring of 1978 -- 11 years after high school -- I had found myself wondering if maybe I no longer had the potential I had as a little kid. I had washed out too many times to be confident, and I told myself that for one quarter, I would do something I hadn't done since high school.

I would attend every class and do every assignment. I remembered Woody Allen saying 80 percent of life is just showing up.

I told sociology guy this time I would try for the A.

I had four classes that spring, two of them in areas I had never done well -- science and foreign languages. I was taking Chemistry, Elementary German, Sociology and a fourth class I have long since forgotten what it was. I attended every class, turned in every assignment, took every test and even did some studying.

And for the first time since sixth grade, I got A's in every class.

I figured I was on my way to a brilliant academic career at George Mason, but in my second semester there, my marriage fell apart and it was all I could do to get through school with enough to launch my 28-year career as a journalist.

My kids did much better in school than I did. Pauline earned two degrees from UCLA cum laude and Virgile didn't get anything lower than an A in his major at Cal State Northridge.

He always said the best advice I ever gave him was the Woody Allen quote.

Of course, I got it wrong.

I always thought it was 90 percent.

Most of the time I couldn't even do 80.

I sure am lucky to have such great kids.