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A few weeks ago in Arizona, a Tesla, reportedly on autopilot, smacked into an emergency vehicle that was parked on the side of an interstate while an officer was investigating another accident.
Which got me thinking, where is my self-driving car?
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My morning bike ride — one of the more positive behavioral traditions I’ve adopted since working at home — has been complicated this week by school buses and well-dressed children toting books under their arms.
I don’t mind. It’s the kind of warm and tender scene I haven’t had enough of during the past five months — a gentle sign that the world is returning to normal. Except that it’s not. As the rhetoric heats up over election fraud and voting by mail, it’s important to remember this number: 3,143.
That’s how many counties, and county equivalents (boroughs, independent cities, etc.) exist in this country. You might be concerned that Washington is usurping local control in myriad ways, but national elections remain about as local as they can be. Each of those counties conducts elections under its own rules — many of these are set by their states, but counties often retain control over certain elements of how votes are collected and tallied. That’s a beautiful thing. If you live in Utah’s fourth congressional district, consider yourself lucky. You live in the rarest of political territories -- a competitive district.
You might say you’ve gone retro. Back in the 19th century, the U.S. House of Representatives saw a 45% turnover each election, on average. On 15 different occasions back then, more than half of the House was new after an election, according to Josh Huder, a senior fellow at the Government Affairs Institute at Georgetown University. Now we know -- the people who crowded a Utah County Commission meeting several weeks ago to protest Gov. Gary Herbert’s mask mandate for schools this fall represented a minority.
Most of you think it’s right that students, teachers and administrators wear masks right now. A poll commissioned by the Deseret News and the Hinckley Institute of Politics found 62% of Utahns agreeing with the governor, with 27% opposed and 10% saying they don’t know. But that’s about all a lot of people know with any surety. Only 48% answered yes to the question of whether their local schools should open for in-person classes, and a whopping 21% weren’t sure. History may not repeat itself exactly, but this pandemic has some verses that sound an awful lot like those heard a century ago, when the misnamed Spanish Influenza raged.
If you could hop aboard a time machine and visit a meeting of the Weber County boards of health, Ogden city leaders and a committee of business leaders in early December, 1918, you would hardly notice you had gone anywhere. |
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The author
Jay Evensen is the Senior Editorial Columnist of the Deseret News. He has nearly 40 years experience as a reporter, editor and editorial writer in Oklahoma, New York City, Las Vegas and Salt Lake City. He also has been an adjunct journalism professor at Brigham Young and Weber State universities. Archives
March 2023
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