Gerrymandering - Not Supposed To Be

May 16, 2003 - Not Supposed to Be: During the 1950's, the intellectual elite wrote papers, taught government classes in colleges, made speeches and generally promoted the idea that gerry-mandering was wrong. As a young student at the University of Texas in Austin, I disagreed. It was clear to me that rural areas were in power and that area representation was just as important as representation for greater numbers of people. I found that rural people were more sophisticated. I never knew a Red Neck from the country. They were all from the city working in factories or warehouses or whatever. Urbanites banded together like birds of a feather with no real understanding of why they needed to get together. Rural people were diverse, knowledgeable, and full of wisdom. I hated to see all the efforts being made to deal with the gerrymandering problem. Well, most of the family farms are gone. Small businesses continue to perish on a daily basis and the country has become the suburbs with Red Neck city folks taking over everything. Our congressional districts snake around like a sidewinder rattler. Both political parties continue to abuse the system and dish out blame for what each is responsible for. Politics can be fun as well as dangerous but until our leaders get off the polarization mindset, we will never solve the representation problems created by gerrymandering. All efforts to fix the problem have failed.