Who would want to go up against thugs in a poker game knowing they had marked cards? Or a game of craps with loaded dice? That is called cheating or stealing. But life is unfair, or so they say. While true that observation is more aptly made about events in Nature where diseases, earthquakes, tornadoes and plane crashes hit humanity without concern for anyone’s health, wealth, or place in society.

Rigging is different. It’s deliberate. And dishonest. And deadly. Anyone who engages in rigging is about as rotten as they come. Those who look the other way are equally callous, cold, and complicit. Those who defend rigging have no right to a seat at any place of honor—not in my thinking, and I do not pretend to a “holier than thou” attitude in any aspect of my outlook on life.

That said, elections in the United States at the national level are rigged by our Constitution. It all started with the establishment of the electoral system that gave unfair representation to landowners directly, but to slave owners indirectly. That’s rotten. Gerrymandering is a furtherance of that original rigging. It stinks. Making voting difficult for the poor or the immobile is another step in rigging elections. More garbage! And now we have outside meddling in our elections by our adversaries as another huge way to win by rigging what the insecure wimps among us cannot achieve by honesty.

What do they hope to bring about by rigging elections? The answer is simple: Rigging lets them elect other sons-of-bitches to public office who will pass laws that favor dictators and the ultra-wealthy. They can also stack our court system with dishonest judges who will do their bidding. In just a few years they can shift the entire burden for fighting wars onto the downtrodden, strip others from health, wealth, and a fighting chance in life while they reap all the benefits without putting forth an honest day’s work. It is a corrupt way of life that has no end short of total control by the few and total subjugation of the many.

Oh yes, I did not mention that the perpetrators of this rigging game also defend it with lies, lies, and more lies as if the rest of us don’t understand the definition of cheating, stealing, and lying. We do. But, of course, those on the low end of the IQ curve do not make such distinctions. They are easily misled into thinking that the riggers are their friends. It’s called propaganda of the masses. Hitler used it. So did Stalin. And other tyrants. How pathetic is that?

Those of us who believe in fair play, and in justice for all need to band together and proclaim our outrage against all these forms of rigging before it is too late. Rigging leads to dictators, and dictators have no respect for human life. They especially hate freedom, freedom fighters, and intellectuals. They have been known to have rounded them up by the thousands and summarily executed them.

George Santayana gave us this caution: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” We don’t get that many chances at telling the truth about despots and liars before it is too late.