This literally happened last week. I walked down the dairy aisle of the supermarket. A woman unknown to me turned and expressed horror at the price of a dozen eggs. I said yeah and walked on to the yogurt I had been assigned from home to get.
Then, as I studied yogurt varieties, the woman rolled her cart behind me and said, "Vote 'em all out."
I said nothing. I argue politics quite enough. I only wanted to select those nine little yogurt cups by the flavor distribution dictated--three blueberry, three lime, three something I forget.
Can you imagine? A woman is livid over the price of eggs and vowed to vote out the lot of them. And if I say, uh, ma'am, let me explain that your vote needs to be cast more surgically than that; you need to understand that abrupt blanket votes such as yours contribute to our inability to reduce schoolchildren's risk of being massacred.
Soon the intercom might have announced that a large man was down with egg on his face on the dairy aisle.
Yet again, amid funerals for fourth-graders, it appears we won't get significant or even modestly sensible legislation on guns because swing voters approve of tougher gun laws but don't vote on that basis.
The only votes at risk through gun restriction are those from the Republican base. They would cast out GOP officeholders in primaries if they went along with anything the national association of gun-sellers didn't like. Or they would not turn out for supposed RINOs against Democrats in general elections.
Behold the irony: Gov. Asa Hutchinson says we need patience on new gun laws in the state but that he applauds the bipartisan talks in the U.S. Senate on a few practical proposals. Yet weekend news articles indicate those talks are breaking down and perhaps will be salvaged only by setting up a system of incentives for states that might choose to pass their own red-flag laws to take guns from people determined in a court to be a danger to themselves or others.
The buck passes from Little Rock to Washington. Then it boomerangs from Washington to Little Rock. Meanwhile, overnight, bullets fly into crowds in Philadelphia and Arizona.
Democrats say, "My God, we must do something at long last." Republicans say, "For God's sake, the problem isn't the gun but the sick and evil people abusing it."
The National Rifle Association says "For goodness' sakes, the answer is to sell even more of our products because a few shootouts with these creeps will put the quietus to this nonsense."
And I say the blame lies with all of us through the low caliber of politics that either we dictate from our political bases or enable or tolerate from our disengaged center.
It's right there in the poll numbers. Americans vaguely say, sure, they'd like to see uniform background checks, a later age for buying an assault rifle and laws permitting guns to be taken from someone proven in court to be dangerous. All of that makes perfect sense to them.
Polls have shown majorities exceeding 80 percent of Americans, including majorities among Republicans, believing in universal uniformity in gun-sale background checks and taking guns from persons shown to be a danger.
But these same Americans then say that, when it comes to voting, they'll decide on matters on which their sentiments are less vague and more personal. They say they haven't been shot but that they have been price-shocked. They'll vote based on the costs burdening them and their families at the gasoline pump and in the grocery store. And they'll throw out whomever is currently in charge.
A poll late last week for ABC News found that respondents said by a plurality of 40 percent that they'd base their votes on economic or inflation issues and that only 17 said they'd base them on gun issues. (Voting based on abortion was a mere 12 percent.) The poll found that, on the determinative economic issues, only 27 percent approved of Joe Biden's job performance.
Those are numbers portending what they call a midterm "wave," otherwise known as a wipeout for the party in power.
Americans of a swing-vote variety won't bother at all with the midterms, certainly not the party primaries, because those are for the two parties and swing voters can't stand either of them. They'll wait until the next presidential election when the choice could well be the same--a blunderer and a seditionist.
You can't get better choices unless you participate in nominating those choices.
That ABC poll showed that voter enthusiasm--a key in midterm elections--is all with the Republicans. Fifty-seven percent of them are very enthusiastic compared to 44 percent of Democrats and, more to the decisive point, 30 percent of independents.
Numbers like those are all too common in contemporary midterms. What they do is keep the American political seesaw ever in motion--up one year and down two years later--as the sound of gunfire grows ever louder.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.